The tech giant has crossed an incredible threshold to be valued at $7.6 trillion.
Nvidia has become the first $US5 trillion ($7.6 trillion) company, just three months after the Silicon Valley chipmaker was the first to break through the $US4 trillion barrier.
It has hit the incredible benchmark off the back of an artificial intelligence craze that’s widely viewed as the biggest tectonic shift in technology since Apple unveiled the first iPhone 18 years ago.
Apple rode the iPhone’s success to become the first publicly traded company to be valued at $US1 trillion, $US2 trillion and eventually $US3 trillion.
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But there are concerns of a possible AI bubble, with officials at the Bank of England 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 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 (Thursday AEDT), the shares closed at $US207.04 with 24.3 billion shares outstanding, putting its market cap at $US5.03 trillion.
Nvidia's value is now greater than the GDP of India, Japan and the United Kingdom, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Nvidia carved out an early lead in tailoring its chipsets known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, from use in powering video games to helping to train powerful AI systems, such as the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators.
Demand skyrocketed as more people began using AI chatbots. Tech companies scrambled for more chips to build and run them.
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has downplayed concerns of a bubble bursting. He said the generative AI chatbots that were merely “interesting” when they first took hold a few years ago were now becoming so useful they would become profitable.
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Huang was headed to South Korea this week as leaders from major Pacific Rim economies, including the United States, China and Japan, gathered for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit that has long championed free trade but is now confronting sweeping US tariffs on technology and other products.
The multilateral gathering in Gyeongju is expected to be overshadowed by a sideline event — a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — as their intensifying trade war leaves the South Korean hosts in a difficult balancing act.
This week, Huang disclosed $US500 billion in chip orders. The company also announced a partnership with Uber on robotaxis and a $US1 billion investment in Nokia, with the two planning to work together on 6G technology.
In addition, Nvidia is teaming with the US Department of Energy to build seven new AI supercomputers.
Last month, Nvidia announced it would invest $US100 billion in OpenAI as part of a partnership that will add at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI data centres to ramp up the computing power for the owner of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.
In August, Huang said Nvidia was discussing a potential new computer chip designed for China with the Trump administration. Trump said on Air Force One that he would speak to Xi about Nvidia's chips on the sidelines of the APEC event that Huang is also attending.
In August, Trump announced a deal with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD to lift export controls on sales of advanced chips to China in exchange for a 15 per cent cut of the revenue, despite concerns from national security experts that such chips would end up in the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services.
That same month, Trump announced the US government had taken a 10 per cent stake in Intel worth around $US11 billion.
Then, Nvidia announced last month it was investing $US5 billion in Intel and would collaborate with the struggling semiconductor company.
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