Nvidia hits $3 trillion market cap; passes Apple to be 2nd behind Microsoft

Nvidia hit $3 trillion market cap on Wednesday after shares rose over 5% to close at $1,224 per share, thereby having a market value of $3.019 trillion. It passed Apple which stood at $2.99 trillion to become the second-most valuable public company, behind Microsoft. Microsoft is the most valuable publicly traded company, with a market cap of $3.15 trillion, as at market close.

Founded by Jensen Huang, Curtis Priem, Chris Malachowsky, Nvidia is a technology company that designs and supplies graphics processing units, application programming interfaces and system on a chip units.

The chip company hit the elite $2 trillion club in February 2024, following reports of impressive earnings that fueled Wall Street’s appetite for artificial intelligence.

Nvidia shares have surged more than 24% since the company reported its first-quarter earnings in May and have been on a strong upward trend since last year. Nvidia holds an estimated 80% market share in AI chips for data centers, which are drawing billions of dollars in spending from major cloud vendors.

Investors are increasingly confident that Nvidia’s substantial sales growth to a few large cloud companies can continue. In the most recent quarter, revenue from its data center business, which includes GPU sales, jumped 427% from a year ago to $22.6 billion, representing about 86% of the company’s total sales.

Interestingly, Apple was the first company to achieve market caps of $1 trillion and $2 trillion. It held the title of the most valuable U.S. company for an extended period but was surpassed by Microsoft earlier this year. Microsoft has also gained from increasing investor demand for AI infrastructure.