Nvidia Briefly Became Most Valuable Company Ever

Nvidia reportedly became the most valuable company ever for a period of time Thursday (July 3) morning before slipping below that mark later in the day.

The artificial intelligence chip designer’s market capitalization rose as high as $3.92 trillion, briefly surpassing Apple’s record closing value of $3.915 trillion on Dec. 26, 2024, Reuters reported Thursday.

Nvidia’s market cap dipped to $3.89 trillion later Thursday, according to the report.

The company still has the largest market value at this time, with Microsoft ranked second at $3.7 trillion and Apple third at $3.19 trillion, the report said.

The report attributed Nvidia’s surge to Wall Street’s continued optimism about AI; tech giants’ demand for the company’s products, which they need to build their AI data centers; and Nvidia’s relatively modest price-to-earnings valuation.

Nvidia’s market cap has increased nearly eightfold over the past four years, according to the report.

The firm’s stock has rebounded from its recently closing low on April 4, which was attributed to the announcements of new tariffs in the United States that were made at that time, per the report.

When Nvidia’s market cap hit what was then its all-time high on June 25, Bloomberg reported that the company faces restrictions on selling advanced semiconductors in China but also has big customers like Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon that are aggressively building AI infrastructure.

During a May 28 earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said new U.S. export controls have effectively “closed” the $50 billion Chinese market to American companies.

Despite that setback, Nvidia is pushing ahead with AI infrastructure projects worldwide to meet demand for AI workloads.

The company is doing so because demand for AI inference — the AI workloads in which new data is applied to trained models to generate outputs — is soaring. Other areas of growth include enterprise and industrial AI, and Nvidia has solutions for both, Huang said during the call.

When Apple’s market capitalization surged in late December, analysts attributed the rise to the company’s involvement with AI and an expectation that the technology would lead to a wave of consumers deciding to upgrade their phones at once.

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