NVIDIA Passes Apple to Become Largest Company

Nvidia continues to ride the AI tech wave. The Santa Clara-based semiconductor and graphics card producer has surpassed Apple as the largest company by market cap, reaching beyond the $3.4 trillion mark with a 2.85% climb in value on Tuesday.

Apple was the first company to reach a $1 trillion and then a $2 trillion market cap. Nvidia previously overtook Apple in June before slipping over the summer. Microsoft, ranked third with a market cap close to $3.1 trillion, is a major customer of Nvidia GPUs to support its partnership with OpenAI as well as its own AI ambitions.

Nvidia has been Wall Street’s success story, driven by the widespread adoption of AI over the past two years. Nvidia’s microchips and processors power a large portion of the computing behind leading AI companies, such as OpenAI and their popular ChatGPT large language model. Nvidia is the dominant supplier of GPUs, which are essential in developing and deploying advanced AI software like ChatGPT.

Investor enthusiasm for this market sector has driven Nvidia’s market cap upward. Its stock is now up more than 2,700% over the past five years, and revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, tripling in three of them.