Nvidia Achieves Record $4 Trillion Market Capitalization

Nvidia now has the distinction of being the world’s first $4 trillion public company.

The chip designer’s market capitalization rose below that mark Wednesday (July 9), though it had dipped to $3.9 trillion by midafternoon. It is now the market’s biggest company, ahead of Microsoft and its $3.73 trillion market cap.

The news comes six days after Nvidia briefly became the world’s largest company, with its market capitalization climbing as high as $3.92 trillion on July 3.

As Reuters noted in a report on this more recent milestone, the company’s shares jumped to a record high of $164, with Nvidia enjoying a continuing boom in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

The report also pointed out that this rally comes on the heels of a slower start to the year, after the rise of lower-cost Chinese AI model DeepSeek called into question some of the intense spending on American AI projects.

“It started out as being a gaming chipmaker and then a crypto mining chipmaker and now as a chipmaker for artificial intelligence computing power,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B Riley Wealth, said of Nvidia. “It is continuing to move forward and be a clear early winner of artificial intelligence.”

Nvidia crossed the $1 trillion market value threshold in June 2023, tripling that valuation in roughly a year. Microsoft and Apple are the only other American companies with a market value of more than $3 trillion.

During an earnings call in late May, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said newly-adopted  U.S. export controls had effectively “closed” the $50 billion Chinese market to companies in the U.S.

But despite that setback, the CEO said, Nvidia is pushing ahead with AI infrastructure projects worldwide to address 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,” PYMNTS noted. “Other areas of growth include enterprise and industrial AI, and Nvidia has solutions for both.”

The company’s shares had hit another record high in June, with reports at that time noting that in spite of the restrictions Nvidia faces in China, it also has big customers like Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon that are aggressively building AI infrastructure.