AI Boom Makes Chipmaker Nvidia World’s Most Valuable Company

Nvidia has taken the lead as three companies race to hold the title of the world’s most valuable company.

The chipmaker overtook Microsoft and Apple on Tuesday (June 18) as its shares rose as much as 4% and its market capitalization reached about $3.3 trillion, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

The three companies have been changing positions among the world’s three most valuable companies over the past month, according to the report.

All three have been driven by the wave of investor interest in artificial intelligence (AI), the report said.

Nvidia’s gains are driven by its status as the dominant maker of chips that help power data centers that run the computing tasks needed by AI applications, per the report.

Microsoft has benefited from its investment and partnership with OpenAI, while Apple’s shares surged this week after it made its long-awaited announcement of its plans for AI, according to the report.

Daniel Ives, analyst and Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note, per the report: “We believe over the next year the race to $4 Trillion Market Cap in Tech will be front and center between Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft.”

In Nvidia’s most recent earnings release, the chipmaker said its revenue for the quarter ended April 28 was up 18% compared to the previous quarter and up 262% from the same period a year earlier, reaching $26 billion.

The company’s sales beat Wall Street expectations and even its own outlook for the quarter, which had been $24 billion.

Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in the earnings release that the company’s revenue growth was driven by companies and countries partnering with the chipmaker to transition from their traditional data centers to “AI factories” that will deliver productivity gains in many industries.

On Friday (June 14), Nvidia unveiled a family of open models that generate synthetic data for training large language models (LLMs) across various industries.

On June 2, the company said it will debut a next-generation AI platform called Rubin in 2026 and will update its AI accelerators each year, with the Blackwell Ultra chip due in 2025.

When announcing those products, Huang said he expects more and more companies and government agencies to embrace generative AI.

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