Chip manufacturer Nvidia crossed $3 trillion in market capitalisation on Wednesday, surpassing iPhone producer Apple Inc. in the process. Nvidia’s shares surged 5% on Wednesday on Wall Street, taking its total market cap to $3.01 trillion, in comparison to Apple’s $2.99 trillion. With this, Nvidia has now become the second most valuable publicly traded company in the US. Microsoft continues to remain the most valuable at $3.15 billion.
This isn’t the first instance of the chipmaker being more valuable than Apple. The last time this happened though, was two decades earlier, in 2002, five years before the launch of the first iPhone. Back then, both companies were valued under $10 billion.
Nvidia had first crossed a trillion dollars in market capitalisation in May 2023. It crossed $2 trillion for the first time in February this year.
In just nine trading sessions since the company announced its quarterly results after market hours on May 22, the stock has risen 29%. Nvidia is said to have an 80% market share in AI chips for data centers, for which, big cloud players are currently loosening their purse strings and spending the billions.
For the most recent quarter, Nvidia’s GPU sales rose 427% year-on-year to cross $22 billion, and accounted for nearly 86% of its overall topline. The company also announced a 10-for-1 stocks split and boost its quarterly dividend by 150%.
In comparison, Apple’s shares are up only 5% so far in 2024 as the iPhone-maker’s growth appears to have stagnated in its core markets. In its most recent earnings report, Apple said overall sales fell 4%, while iPhone sales declined by 10% from the comparable quarter last year. The company has been struggling with demand in China, and mixed reactions to its new virtual reality headset, Vision Pro.
Apple was the first company to cross all milestones of $1 trillion, $2 trillion and $3 trillion market cap. It also held the most-valued company title for long, before being surpassed by Microsoft this year. With shares behaving the way they are, Nvidia is on course and within touching distance of surpassing Microsoft sooner or later.
Shares of Nvidia ended 5.2% higher overnight at $1,224.40.
(With Inputs From Agencies.)
Content Courtesy – CNBCTV 18
