U.S. chip giant Nvidia made history on Wednesday by becoming the first publicly traded company ever to hit a staggering $4 trillion in market value. This milestone cements Nvidia’s dominance in the AI and chipmaking space, making the shares of the company go at an all-time high rate of $164.
Nvidia has surpassed both Apple and Microsoft—the only other companies that had ever crossed the $3 trillion mark before this. The world’s most valuable company’s explosive growth is mainly driven by its powerful AI chips. That has pushed it ahead of them and into an entirely new league.
Although Nvidia briefly crossed the $4 trillion mark before its value slipped just below that by the time the market closed, with shares ending the day at $162.88. Still, the surge in demand for its AI chips has made the company’s stocks jumped nearly 10 times since early 2023, when the company was worth around $400 billion.
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Chip giant Nvidia’s skyrocketing market value is a clear sign of Wall Street’s deep belief in the explosive future of artificial intelligence. Microsoft, valued at $3.75 trillion, is now at number 2, followed by Apple.
The company’s journey didn’t happen overnight. Founded back in April 1993, Nvidia originally made its name in gaming. Its first product, the NV1 graphics accelerator, came out in 1995. Over the years, it kept improving its GPU technology and became the go-to brand for high-performance gaming graphics cards. But the real game-changer was its early bet on using GPUs not just for gaming, but for heavy-duty computing—particularly AI.
That decision turned out to be a masterstroke. Today, Nvidia’s chips power everything from large language models (LLMs) to cutting-edge robotics and data centers. Whether it’s OpenAI training ChatGPT or Meta building new AI tools, Nvidia’s hardware is at the core of it all. Its GPUs have become essential for deep learning tasks, making it a backbone of modern AI development.
All the biggest names in tech—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Meta—are among Nvidia’s top customers right now. But at the same time, Nvidia is facing a series of export controls and bans from the U.S. government. In April 2025, the U.S. administration implemented stricter export rules that effectively halted Nvidia’s ability to sell its H20 AI accelerator into China. This was particularly impactful because the H20 was originally designed to comply with earlier restrictions but still offered advanced capabilities—until the new rules put everything on hold.
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As a result, Nvidia was forced to write down around $4.5 billion worth of unsold H20 inventory in its first fiscal quarter of 2026. Beyond that, the company reported an additional $2.5 billion in potential sales that couldn’t be shipped .
“Losing access to the China AI accelerator market, which we believe will grow to nearly $50bn, would have a material adverse impact on our business going forward and benefit our foreign competitors in China and worldwide,” Nvidia’s CFO Collette Kress said.