Nvidia has continued to move barriers as it became the first company ever to hit $5 trillion in market valuation, only three months after the Silicon Valley chipmaker was first to break through the $4 trillion mark.
Hitting the new benchmark puts more emphasis on the upheaval being unleashed by an artificial intelligence craze that's widely viewed as the biggest tectonic shift in technology since Apple co-founder Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone 18 years ago.
Apple rode the iPhone's success to become the first publicly traded company to be valued at $1 trillion, $2 trillion and eventually, $3 trillion.
But there are concerns of a possible AI bubble, with officials at the Bank of England (BoE) earlier this month flagging the growing risk that tech stock prices pumped up by the AI boom could burst. The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has raised a similar alarm.
The ravenous appetite for Nvidia's chips is the main reason that the company's stock price has increased so rapidly since early 2023.
On Wednesday the shares touched $207.86 in early morning trading with 24.3 billion shares outstanding, putting its market cap at $5.05 trillion.
In comparison, Nvidia's value is greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of India, Japan or the U.K., according to the IMF.
On Tuesday, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled $500 billion in AI chip orders and said he plans to build seven supercomputers for the U.S. government.
Moreover, U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to discuss Nvidia's Blackwell chip with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, reflecting the company's growing clout in an escalating U.S.-China tech rivalry.
Nvidia's $5 trillion valuation, coming just over three months after it crossed $4 trillion, is just another milestone in the company's transformation from a niche graphics-chip designer into the backbone of the global AI industry, helping it outpace rivals and turning Huang into a Silicon Valley icon.
Nvidia's shares have jumped nearly twelvefold since OpenAI's ChatGPT launched nearly three years ago, massively outperforming the benchmark S&P 500 index's 69% gains over the same period.
Last month, the company announced that it will invest $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a partnership that will add at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI data centers to ramp up the computing power for the maker of ChatGPT.
"In the long run, we expect tech titans to strive to find second-sources or in-house solutions to diversify away from Nvidia in AI, but these efforts will, at best, only chip away at, but not supplant, Nvidia's AI dominance," said Brian Colello, senior equity analyst at Morningstar.
At current prices, CEO Huang's stake in Nvidia would be worth about $177.4 billion, according to regulatory filings and Reuters calculations, making him the world's eighth-richest person, per Forbes.
Born in Taiwan and raised in the U.S. from age 9, Huang has led Nvidia since founding it in 1993. Under his leadership, the company's H100 and Blackwell processors have become the engines behind large-language models (LLMs) powering tools like ChatGPT and Elon Musk's xAI.
While Nvidia remains the clear front runner in the AI race, peers such as Apple and Microsoft have also crossed $4 trillion in market value in recent months.
Analysts say the rally reflects investor confidence in unrelenting AI spending, though some warn valuations may be running hot.
The companies' heavy weightings in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 gives them broad influence over global markets.
Nvidia is due to report quarterly results on Nov. 19.
The company's dominance has drawn global regulatory scrutiny, with U.S. export curbs on advanced chips making it a key pawn in Washington's strategy to limit China's access to AI technology.
"Nvidia clearly brought their story to D.C. to both educate and gain favor with the U.S. government," said Bob O'Donnell of TECHnalysis Research. "They managed to hit most of the hottest and most influential topics in tech."
The developer conference on Tuesday also served as a platform for Huang to walk a geopolitical tightrope.
He praised Trump's "America First" policies for accelerating domestic tech investment, while warning that excluding China from Nvidia's ecosystem could limit U.S. access to half of the world's AI developers.
Rivals, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and several well-funded startups are seeking to challenge Nvidia's dominance in high-end AI chips, but it remains the industry's top choice.
