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Nvidia has become the first company to hit a $4tn market capitalisation, on the back of a rapid rebound for Wall Street technology stocks in recent months.
Shares in the Silicon Valley-based maker of artificial intelligence chips rose as much as 2.8 per cent on Wednesday to a peak of $164.42 to surpass the milestone, but ultimately closed 1.8 per cent higher at a valuation of $3.97tn. The group had already surpassed Apple’s $3.92tn record from last December.
Nvidia stock has risen by more than 40 per cent since early May, when US President Donald Trump first signalled a thaw in his trade war with China and Nvidia struck a series of multibillion-dollar chip deals in the Middle East.
The company has become the biggest beneficiary of a tech boom that has exceeded the headiest days of the dotcom era, thanks to its dominance of the chips that fuel AI services such as ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot that has become the fastest-growing app of all time.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has been bullish in his predictions that AI and robotics can drive trillions of dollars in sales for his company over the coming years, as upgrades to its processors and data centre infrastructure extend its lead over rivals.
Advances in AI and new sources of demand were “kicking into turbocharge”, Huang told investors in May as Nvidia reported a 70 per cent surge in quarterly revenues.
The AI chipmaker surpassed $1tn in market value little more than two years ago, months after the launch of ChatGPT triggered a dash for its processors among Big Tech companies and AI start-ups looking to train large language models.
Nvidia’s shares hit $2tn in February 2024 and $3tn in June last year. But the stock’s momentum sputtered at the start of 2025, amid doubts about whether AI groups’ demand for its chips would keep growing as well as concern about the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs and export restrictions to China.
Those fears were further fuelled when Chinese upstart DeepSeek released a powerful model at the turn of the year that it claimed used a fraction of the computing resources consumed by the likes of OpenAI.
While significant limits on Nvidia’s ability to sell its most powerful chips in China remain, investors hope that continued demand from US Big Tech customers, as well as so-called “sovereign AI” deals in Europe and the Middle East, will continue to propel its growth.
Nvidia’s revenue is projected to reach almost $200bn this year, up 55 per cent year on year. Net income this year is forecast to be $105bn, according to analyst estimates collected by S&P Capital IQ, with gross margins of more than 70 per cent.
Confidence in the sustainability of the AI boom has also been bolstered by strong revenue growth at leading start-ups such as OpenAI, which said last month that annual recurring revenue had almost doubled to $10bn, and Anthropic, which has reportedly hit $4bn in sales on the same metric.
“The more AI, the better bottom line,” Huang told analysts last month. “The absence of AI is the only thing I worry about.”
