Nvidia (NVDA) on Wednesday became the first publicly traded company to reach a $4 trillion market valuation, eclipsing other tech titans like Microsoft and Apple (AAPL). The chipmaker’s stock has surged 22% year-to-date and 24% over the past 12 months.
The company continues to ride the wave of generative AI enthusiasm that began with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022. Nvidia’s combination of high-performance chips, modified GPUs, and its proprietary CUDA software platform gives it a decisive edge in powering AI applications — a challenge that rivals like AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC) have yet to match.
Major tech firms such as Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), and Tesla (TSLA) are investing heavily in Nvidia’s hardware, pouring billions into data center infrastructure to support their cloud-based AI services and in-house model development.
Earlier this year, Nvidia’s momentum appeared at risk after DeepSeek unveiled its R-1 model, which it claimed was trained using less expensive hardware. That news triggered a $600 million drop in Nvidia’s market cap in January. Wall Street feared the shift from training AI models to inference — using AI models — might lessen demand for Nvidia’s premium processors.
But those concerns have since faded. Nvidia’s chips remain some of the most powerful for both training and inference tasks, proving their value in an evolving AI ecosystem.
The company has also gained from the rise of sovereign AI — where countries build domestic data centers to control their own AI capabilities. Nvidia is expected to supply hundreds of thousands of chips to nations including Saudi Arabia and several across Europe.
Despite setbacks from U.S. restrictions on chip exports to China — which led to a $4.5 billion revenue hit last quarter and an anticipated $8 billion impact in the current one — Nvidia’s stock continues to rise.
With its next-gen Blackwell Ultra chips on the horizon and little competitive threat in sight, Nvidia’s historic $4 trillion milestone may just be another step on its upward trajectory.
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