Nvidia overtakes Apple in market value as the second most valuable US public company

Nvidia PASSED Apple at market value on Wednesday as investors continue to bet on the chipmaker behind the artificial intelligence boom. It is now the second most valuable public company, after Microsoft.

Nvidia also hit a $3 trillion milestone on Wednesday as shares rose more than 5%. At the close of the market, Nvidia had a market value of $3.019 trillion, compared to Apple’s, which was $2.99 ​​trillion. Microsoft is the most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalization of $3.15 trillion, as of Wednesday.

Shares of Nvidia are up more than 24% since the company reported first-quarter earnings in May and have been in decline since last year. The company has an 80% market share in AI chips for data centers, which are attracting billions of dollars in spending from major cloud vendors.

Investors are also becoming more comfortable that Nvidia’s strong sales growth in a handful of cloud companies could continue. For the most recent quarter, revenue in the data center business, which includes sales of GPUs, rose 427% from a year earlier to $22.6 billion, about 86% of the company’s overall sales.

Meanwhile, Apple shares are up only about 5% this year as the iPhone maker’s sales growth has stalled in recent months. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, Apple said overall sales fell 4% and iPhone sales fell 10% from the year-ago period. Apple faces questions and strategic issues about China demand, production and mixed reactions to its new virtual reality headset, the Vision Pro.

Apple was the first company to reach a market cap of $1 trillion and $2 trillion. It had long held the title of America’s most valuable company, but was passed over by Microsoft earlier this year. Microsoft has also benefited from investor demand for AI infrastructure.

Nvidia has been more volatile as a stock than Apple. Founded in 1991, the company focused primarily on gaming, selling hardware for playing 3D computer games. More recently, it sold cryptocurrency mining chips and cloud subscription services.

Shares of Nvidia have gone parabolic as its AI business has developed, rising more than 3,290% over the past five years. The company announced a 10-for-1 stock split in May.