Nvidia becomes world's first $5 trillion company

AI boom sends shares soaring

Nvidia has officially become the world's first company to surpass a $5 trillion market capitalisation.

Nvidia has officially become the world's first company to surpass a $5 trillion market capitalisation.

Shares of the Santa Clara-based chipmaker climbed more than 5% to over $211 at around 9:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.

The achievement comes less than four months after Nvidia hit the $4 trillion threshold in July. The company's rapid rise has been fuelled by surging demand for its high-performance AI chips, which power everything from datacentres to autonomous vehicles and next-generation robotics.

Nvidia now stands ahead of Apple, whose market cap sits around $4 trillion, followed by Microsoft, Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, and Meta.

Nvidia's latest surge follows a wave of announcements made by CEO Jensen Huang during the company's annual AI conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this week, including a series of major partnerships and investments such as deals with Nokia on 5G infrastructure and Uber on AI-driven logistics and mobility systems.

Huang also revealed that Nvidia expects to receive $500 billion in AI chip orders through next year.

When asked by NBC News about whether the AI sector's skyrocketing valuations suggest a potential bubble, Huang dismissed the notion, insisting that "these companies are generating real revenues" and that their products "are profitable."

Bigger than all rivals combined

At $5 trillion, Nvidia's market capitalisation now exceeds the combined value of all its major competitors, including AMD, Intel, TSMC, Broadcom, Micron, ASML, Lam Research, Qualcomm, and Arm Holdings.

The company's stock has soared over 50% this year alone, and an astounding 1,500% over the past five years. By comparison, the S&P 500 has risen just 17% in 2025, while the Nasdaq Composite has gained 23%.

Keith Lerner, chief investment officer and chief market strategist at Truist Advisory Services, described Nvidia's valuation as "unimaginable a few years ago."

"The market is certainly putting a lot of stock into the idea that AI will be transformational," he added.

Adding to the bullish sentiment, President Donald Trump teased on Tuesday night that he planned to discuss Nvidia's Blackwell chip, the company's most advanced AI processor, with Chinese President Xi Jinping when they met in South Korea yesterday. He has since said that the topic didn’t come up.

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals in recent months regarding how far it is willing to go in limiting China's access to cutting-edge AI technologies.

Nvidia's growth has also turned Jensen Huang into one of the world's richest individuals. His net worth has surged to over $180 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, up nearly $68 billion since the start of the year.

Some analysts are urging caution.

Of the 80 analysts tracked by Bloomberg, more than 90% currently rate Nvidia a "buy" or equivalent, but a handful warn that expectations may have outpaced reality.

"Nvidia is likely to cede some market share to competitors like AMD and Broadcom," said Dan Eye, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group.

"It's been tough to not own Nvidia, but it really is priced for elevated expectations."

Still, Nvidia's current valuation suggests investors remain confident in its profitability, especially as AI continues to reshape industries from healthcare to defence.

"If what everyone is betting on with AI comes to fruition, then valuations are probably justified," Eye added, " but certainly some of it might be difficult to live up to."

Computing says:

The word ‘if’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the sentence above. The US economy has thrown all its chips on the table to bet on the money-making potential of proprietary AI.

China seems more temperamentally suited to the US to playing a longer game, and its focus has been to advance open-source LLM’s at pace. Indeed, President Xi Jinping said earlier this week that he would sanction “extraordinary measures” to obtain a chip or AI breakthrough.

It’s possible that the US focus on profit (as well as the rate at which OpenAI and Anthropic are burning money) is limiting genuine innovation. If Chinese AI companies release a series of cost-effective, performant, open-source models onto global markets, it could detonate a bomb underneath the US economy.