Nvidia has conquered a new milestone – the chipmaking giant surpassed tech behemoth Apple in market cap on Tuesday. Nvidia’s market cap reached a total of $3.43 trillion after a 2.9% increase in its share price, blowing past Apple’s market cap of $3.4 trillion.
The signs had been there, and the development was hardly unexpected, given that Nvidia has seen its shares meteorically rise over the past months. Nvidia has been one of the beneficiaries of the existing (and overwhelming) investor enthusiasm surrounding AI and its potential, and the company’s shares have risen by nearly 850% since the close of 2022. The rapid growth of GPUs alone saw Nvidia shares nearly triple this year.
Nvidia has come a long way from its early days of supplying graphics chips for 3D gaming, and today, its GPUs are used in AI applications and to support AI-powered data processing, from language models to machine vision systems. The company, riding the rising demand for its GPUs, has carved a dominant space for itself in the AI landscape by powering the infrastructure that runs advanced generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The results speak for themselves – today, nearly 75% of the AI accelerators worldwide are made by Nvidia.
The company’s success is evident by the statistics as well – the past five quarters have seen the company’s revenue more than double, while its profits clocked a strong growth from $2.3 billion in early 2022 to $31.5 billion by mid-2024. It is estimated that the current fiscal year will witness yet another strong growth in the company’s revenue, and clock another increase of 44% in 2025. Nvidia currently accounts for nearly 7% of the S&P 500 Index, and is responsible for nearly a quarter of its 21% gain this year.
It is thus hardly surprising that Nvidia has taken full advantage of the boom in AI infrastructure, and currently counts the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon as significant clients. These companies have included Nvidia GPUs in their AI-powered cloud and data center operations – Nvidia is key to Microsoft’s existing initiatives in AI, Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses the company’s tech to boost its own AI cloud services, while social media giant Meta – parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads – utilizes Nvidia GPUs to improve ad targeting.
Apple, which was surpassed by Nvidia on Tuesday, is another client of the chipmaker and integrates its AI functionalities directly into its devices. The iPhone-maker was the first to reach the milestones of having a market cap of $1 trillion (and $2 trillion later on), and the current development marks the second time Nvidia’s market cap has surpassed its own. The first time was back in June, when Nvidia surpassed both Apple and Microsoft (its market cap crossed the $3 trillion mark for the first time to reach $3.34 trillion at that time, before sliding back once more). Currently, Microsoft is ranked third, and has a market cap of nearly $3.1 trillion.
