Nvidia surpasses Apple to become the second-largest public company in the US

Nvidia, Wall Street’s favorite artificial intelligence darling, is continuing to swell to staggering heights.

The AI chipmaker’s market capitalization rose to $3.019 trillion on Wednesday, nudging slightly past Apple’s also $2.99 trillion market cap and making it the second-largest publicly traded company in the US by that measure, just behind Microsoft’s market cap of $3.15 trillion.

Nvidia is now the third company in the US, behind Apple and Microsoft, to cross that $3 trillion mark.

Shares of the Santa Clara-based chipmaker rose 5.2% to about $1,224.4 a share, while Apple shares ended the session up 0.8% at $196.

Those gains also helped boost the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq indexes on Wednesday – both closed at new record highs.

Nvidia (NVDA) has been the biggest beneficiary of the AI mania dominating Wall Street this year; the stock is up 147% so far this year after soaring 239% in 2023.

Apple shares, meanwhile, have gained about 1.7% year-to-date.

Earlier this week, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said that the company would roll out its most advanced AI chip platform, called Rubin, in 2026.

The Rubin platform will succeed the Blackwell, which supplies chips for data centers and was announced only in March. It was dubbed by Nvidia at the time as the “world’s most powerful chip.”

Nvidia accounts for around 70% of AI semiconductor sales and some analysts think the stock has further to go.

“As we look ahead, we think NVDA is on pace to become the most valuable company, given the plethora of ways it can monetize AI and our belief that it has the largest addressable market expansion opportunity across the Tech sector,” wrote Angelo Zino, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research in a note on Wednesday evening.

Shares of the company will soon become more affordable. Nvidia announced a 10-for-1 stock split last month, making buying shares in the red-hot semiconductor company more accessible for individual investors. The post-split shares will begin trading at market open on June 10.

This story has been updated with additional details and context.

Krystal Hur, Wayne Chang and Laura He contributed to this report.

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