Nvidia surpasses Apple to become the 2nd-most-valuable company in the world

• Nvidia is now the second-most-valuable company in the world.
• The ongoing AI boom helped catapult Nvidia’s market valuation to $3.014 trillion.
• With Nvidia now bigger than Apple, the AI chip maker is just slightly behind Microsoft as the world’s biggest company. 

Nvidia surged 5% on Wednesday to become the second-most-valuable company in the world, surpassing Apple.

The stock closed at $1,224.40 per share, giving it a market valuation of $3.014 trillion.

The ongoing artificial intelligence boom has catapulted Nvidia’s market valuation to the $3 trillion club as mega-cap tech companies like Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft rush to buy the company’s supply-constrained AI-enabling GPU chips.

Nvidia’s valuation was just above $950 billion a year-ago and was about $400 billion in November 2022 when OpenAI first released ChatGPT to the public.

Apple stock, while trading near record highs, has stagnated over the past year as investors wait to see what the iPhone maker’s AI strategy is.

Apple stock is up 2% year-to-date, compared to Nvidia’s year-to-date gain of 146%.

Apple held a market valuation of $3.00 trillion Wednesday afternoon, or about $15 billion below Nvidia’s current valuation.

With Apple surpassed, Nvidia is behind only Microsoft, which is the world’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $3.15 trillion.

With the AI boom powering much of the stock market higher, it’s no surprise that the company most responsible for powering the AI boom has turned into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

And tech analyst Beth Kindig of I/O Fund believes the gains can continue on for Nvidia, arguing in a recent interview that the company could be worth $10 trillion by 2030.

“Similar to iOS is really what locked people into the iPhone because developers were developing applications for the iPhone. The same thing is happening with Nvidia, which is that the CUDA platform is what AI engineers are learning in order to program GPUs, so that helps lock them in and that combination, right now, I’m calling it an impenetrable moat,” Kindig said last month.