Nvidia market cap strikes another height, beating Microsoft & Apple as world most valuable

Another record has just been broken, as Nvidia market cap reached $3.34 trillion. That means, the AI chip-making giant has surpassed Microsoft at $3.32 trillion and Apple at $3.29 trillion at market close on Tuesday.

The dramatic turn of events happened roughly a week after Apple reclaimed its spot as the world’s most valuable company. It’s a remarkable ascent for Nvidia, which was trading at only $340 billion in early November 2022, when the company first started to benefit from the AI surge. Since then, shares of Nvidia have increased more than ninefold.

The AI boom mostly contributed to Nvidia’s success, as the company had launched AI chips that now dominate about 70% of the market. It really did go from making gaming graphic cards to hot-wanted products like the A100 and H100 AI chips.

Professional investment funds and individual retail investors alike have thrown their money into Nvidia’s shares, pushing up the price even faster than the company’s revenue has grown. Since OpenAI kicked off the wave of interest in AI with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, Nvidia’s stock price has grown about 700 percent.

It was only in August 2018 that Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to hit a $1 trillion market cap. Then, Microsoft reached the same milestone in April 2019. Apple then held the lead, surpassing $3 trillion in January 2022. The AI boom, however, propelled both Microsoft and Nvidia, with Microsoft reaching $3 trillion in January 2024 and Nvidia in June 2024.