Nvidia (NVDA) on Wednesday became the first publicly traded company to hit the $4 trillion mark, surpassing fellow tech players including Microsoft and Apple (AAPL). The chip maker’s stock price is up 22% year-to-date and 24% over the last 12 months.
The move comes as the chip giant continues to ride the wave of generative AI hype that kicked off with the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022.
Nvidia’s chips, modified graphics cards, and CUDA software platform are designed to both train and run AI programs, giving it a strategic advantage that rivals AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC) continue to struggle to overcome.
Tech behemoths, including Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Tesla (TSLA), and others, are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the company’s hardware as they build out the data centers necessary to provide cloud-based AI offerings to their customers and create their own internal AI models.
Nvidia’s stock price has been on a rollercoaster this year. The company took a $600 million hit to its market cap in January after DeepSeek revealed its R-1 model, which the company claimed it was able to train using less than top-of-the-line chips.
Wall Street went into meltdown mode, as fears arose that Nvidia’s pricey data center chips were falling out of fashion. Couple that with concerns that the AI industry was moving from training AI models to inferencing, or using, AI models, and the market started to believe Nvidia’s processors were no longer necessary.
But so far both of those have proven wrong. Nvidia’s chips are still among the best for training AI models, and the industry has shown that inferencing benefits from more powerful AI processors, as they allow them to answer more complex questions.
Nvidia has also benefited from the growth of so-called soveriegn AI, or AI data centers that allow countries to use their own AI services rather than relying on those abroad. The company is expected to supply hundreds of thousands of chips to countries including Saudi Arabia and those across Europe.
Nvidia has also managed to shake off the Biden and Trump administrations’ bans on the sales of its chips to China. While the company took a massive $4.5 billion hit to its bottom line in its most recent quarter due to the ban, and anticipates a larger $8 billion write down in the current period, it’s stock price continues to climb.
And with the chip maker set to release its next-generation Blackwell Ultra chips, and no competitor in sight, it could continue to grow even further.
