Nvidia Surpasses Apple As World’s Most Valuable Company

Nvidia briefly became the most valuable listed company in the world on Friday, surpassing Apple, following a rally last week that rode the continued intensity of demand for artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Nvidia’s market capitalisation reached $3.53 trillion (£2.3tn) during the day, slightly above Apple’s $3.53tn, before levelling off to around $3.49tn.

Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia have raced neck-in-neck at the top of stock listings this year, as Microsoft and Apple have raced to exploit interest in generative AI, while Nvidia has benefited from its position as the dominant supplier of specialised accelerator chips for the data centres that power AI systems.

Microsoft, which is one of the main backers of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, is currently valued at about $3.19tn.

Stock surge

Nvidia earlier temporarily became the world’s most valuable company in June, before being overtaken by Apple and Microsoft.

The company’s value has surged about 18 percent in October as a massive $6.6bn funding round for OpenAI indicated that investors were placing huge bets on the future of generative AI.

On Friday storage maker Western Digital reported quarterly profits ahead of analysts’ estimates, indicating strong demand for data centre expansion.

The four major US cloud computing companies, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, are likely to continue spending heavily on AI data centres, which is good news for AI chipmakers, said Bank of America Securities analyst Vivek Arya in a note.

Earlier last week Nvidia’s stock reached a record high after contract chipmaker TSMC posted a 54 percent jump in profit driven by demand for AI chips.

The stock has rocketed nearly 190 percent this year amidst optimism around AI services.

‘1000 times better’

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said at an event in Mumbai, India late last week that AI could do some tasks “1000 times better” than humans, but “in no job can they do all of it”.

Asked if he thought AI could take his job, Huang said, “Absolutely not.”

Huang received a rock-star welcome at the Mumbai event, with thousands of attendees travelling from across India to see him speak.

“This was Coldplay, but for tech bros,” Yuvraj Mehta, a robotics engineer, told Reuters.

Apple last month began selling iPhone 16 handsets that it said will include a range of AI features, including a revamp of Siri and text and image generation.

The company earlier this month also introduced an iPad Mini that it said was built for “Apple Intelligence”.