Nvidia stock surged past $5 trillion in market value yesterday, making it the first public company in history to reach this milestone.
Shares climbed over 5% to around $212, driven by a combination of massive AI chip orders and geopolitical developments that could open up the Chinese market.
Interestingly, Nvidia only crossed the $4 trillion mark three months ago in July. To put the scale in perspective, the company is now worth more than the entire stock markets of every country on Earth except the U.S., China, and Japan. It’s also worth more than the entire cryptocurrency market combined.
The immediate catalyst for Wednesday’s surge came from President Donald Trump, who said he plans to discuss Nvidia’s Blackwell AI chip with Chinese President Xi Jinping today.
This matters because Washington’s export controls currently prevent Nvidia from selling its most powerful chips in China, creating a major barrier to what could be an enormous market.
Tuesday brought even more fuel for the rally after CEO Jensen Huang announced that Nvidia has $500 billion in AI chip orders lined up. He also revealed plans to build seven supercomputers for the U.S. government across sectors like security, energy, and science, each requiring thousands of Nvidia GPUs.
On top of that, the company invested $1 billion in Nokia to develop AI-powered 5G and 6G networks using Nvidia’s platforms.
Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Nvidia’s stock has multiplied twelve times over. The company transformed from a graphics chip maker serving gamers into the essential infrastructure provider for the AI revolution.
Its H100 and Blackwell processors have become the engines powering large language models behind ChatGPT, Elon Musk’s xAI, and countless other AI applications.
Jensen Huang’s personal stake in the company is now worth about $179 billion, making him the world’s eighth-richest person. The Taiwan-born CEO has led Nvidia since founding it in 1993, long before anyone imagined AI would create this kind of demand for specialized computing hardware.
Nvidia’s dominance stems from scarcity as much as capability. Its GPUs are valuable partly because they’re hard to get, and the company’s strategy of funneling them directly into an expanding data center ecosystem keeps demand consistently outstripping supply.
Major tech companies have been announcing multibillion-dollar deals to build the compute capacity needed for AI models, with Nvidia frequently at the center.
In September alone, Nvidia committed up to $100 billion to OpenAI over the coming years, planning to deploy 10 gigawatts worth of systems to power OpenAI’s operations.
Apple currently holds the number two spot with a $4 trillion market cap, followed by Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. The broader tech rally reflects investor belief that AI will change industries as fundamentally as the internet did, though some analysts are starting to question whether the valuations have gotten ahead of reality.
For now, though, the market continues betting that AI spending will keep accelerating, and Nvidia remains the clearest way to profit from that trend.
