Nvidia Rides the AI Wave to Become the World’s First $4 Trillion Company
When the stock markets opened this morning, Nvidia (NVDA) became the world’s first publicly traded company to reach a market value of $4 trillion, surpassing tech industry giants Apple and Microsoft in reaching the record-setting benchmark.
While Nvidia’s market cap has since dipped to $3.99 trillion as of writing, it is nonetheless an incredible achievement to be the first company to cross the $4 trillion mark. Nvidia’s extraordinary financial success is due in significant part to the company’s commitment to making chips for the AI arms race, a move that helped it reach a $2 trillion valuation — the highest-ever at the time for a chipmaker — not even a year and a half ago.
In the past five years, Nvidia’s stock price has gone from less than $11 per share to over $163 today. Save for a sizable tumble in April this year, which the company has obviously since recovered from, it has been nearly exclusively good news for the American multinational corporation during the AI era.
Nvidia’s revenue eclipsed $130.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, a 114% increase year-over-year, and way above the company’s $26.97 billion revenue in 2023. Nvidia’s rise has been meteoric.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, which boasts an impressive $3.75 trillion market cap, has experienced tremendous growth of its own over the past five years. Microsoft’s stock price has risen 290 points, or 136%, in five years. In contrast to many of its peers, Microsoft has also had an excellent 2025 so far, with stock prices rising 20.5% since January 1. However, Microsoft recently laid off about 15,000 employees as part of its AI-focused restructuring in the past two months, so while investors may be loving Microsoft, all is not well at the Redmond-based company.
Another company that was a strong contender to hit the $4 trillion market cap mark first, Apple, has experienced a very different 2025 than Nvidia and Microsoft. Apple’s stock price has dropped 35 points (14.3%) so far this year and is about 50 points off its peak from last December. On December 27, 2024, Apple came close to $4 trillion — hitting $3.86 trillion.
From hitting $1 trillion market cap in May 2023 to topping $4 trillion, if only briefly, on July 9, 2025, Nvidia has benefited from the AI hype more than any other company on Earth.
“This is a historical moment for Nvidia, the tech space flexing its muscles, and speaks to the AI Revolution hitting its next stage of growth led by the one chip fueling AI… Nvidia,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told CNN over email today. Ives also told CNN that he expects Microsoft will reach the $4 trillion mark sometime this summer.
Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, believes the company is still in the early stages of AI’s financial and technological potential. He said on an earnings call in May that every country and industry on Earth will need AI. Huang may be right, as the financial markets love AI, even if society at large doesn’t.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
