Home Nvidia surpasses Apple as most valuable company

Nvidia surpasses Apple as most valuable company

TLDR

  • Nvidia's valuation hit $3.6 trillion, surpassing Apple as the world’s most valuable company.
  • Demand for Nvidia's GPUs is driven by AI growth, fueling massive tech industry adoption.
  • Trump’s China tariffs could impact Nvidia, raising hardware costs in the U.S. market.

Nvidia, the company behind gaming graphics cards (GPUs) and the recent artificial intelligence (AI) boom, has seen its stock value soar to $3.6 trillion. This puts the company ahead of Apple as the most valuable company in the world.

It’s also the first company to reach this valuation, which is partially attributed to Donald Trump’s election. As he won the presidency, the S&P 500 technology index rose 4% and has been steadily rising since November 5.

Nvidia’s value has exploded since AI became the talk of the tech industry. The technology relies on the chips Nvidia produces, with GPUs becoming an increasingly hot commodity. Similar to crypto mining rigs, adding more cards to setups can increase the performance of the AI being run.

Companies like Microsoft and OpenAI – makers of ChatGPT – have bought and deployed monster setups. A future cluster of Nvidia’s next chip, the GB200, is poised to use 100,000 chips in a $5 billion initiative.

Nvidia hit the trillion-dollar value in May 2023, and then $2 trillion in February 2024. It finally hit the $3 trillion mark in the following June. As AI continues to be integrated with hardware and software worldwide, the need for Nvidia’s products has become paramount.

Nvidia’s dominates in both AI and gaming as its stock soars

The GPU company has also managed to keep its long-standing dominance in the gaming market. Its RTX 40-series cards might not have been met with the warmest reception, but its work on the software side to improve graphical fidelity and performance has ensured that buyers almost always lean towards Team Green.

This is despite the ever-increasing prices of the hardware, with the RTX 4090 being one of the most expensive consumer GPUs to ever launch.

However, it’s unclear how Nvidia will work with the incoming government. The Californian company has butted heads with the Biden administration, as they have put multiple embargoes on exporting to China. This led to Vietnamese stores stockpiling hardware like the RTX 4090 to sell to the embargoed country.

Trump plans to impose high tariffs on China, which could cause future issues with the rest of the PC hardware industry. It’s expected that things like the smaller components and parts found in hardware that’s manufactured in China will cause US prices to increase under the proposed 10% tariff.

Featured image: Nvidia, Pexels

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The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

Joel Loynds
Tech Journalist

Joel Loynd’s obsession with uncovering bad games and even worse hardware so you don’t have to has led him on this path. Since the age of six, he’s been poking at awful games and oddities from his ever-expanding Steam library. He’s been writing about video games since 2008, writing for sites such as WePC and PC Guide, as well as covering gaming for Scan Computers, More recently Joel was Dexerto’s E-Commerce and Deputy Tech Editor, delving deep into the exploding handheld market and covering the weird and wonderful world of the latest tech.

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