By Austin Alonzo
Nvidia Corp. has become the first publicly traded company to reach a $4 trillion market capitalization.
On July 9, shares in the Santa Clara, California-based technology company traded for as much as $164.42 a share. As of mid-afternoon, the price sagged slightly to 162.73 a share.
With that valuation, Nvidia surpassed Microsoft Corp. to become the most valuable public company in the world in terms of market capitalization. As of mid-afternoon on Wednesday, Microsoft Corp’s market capitalization was about $3.7 trillion.
Nvidia’s coronation as the market capitalization leader is just another milestone for the company that’s been on a remarkable bull run for the past decade.
Founded in 1993, Nvidia initially made its name developing high-performance graphics processing units for gaming. Over the past 10 years, however, the company has become the dominant supplier of specialized chips used to power generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, including those developed by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Amazon.
In July 2015, according to historic market data, Nvidia stock traded at less than 50 cents a share on average. By July 2020, the average trading price rose to about $10 a share.
The company’s stock has risen in value by more than 1,000 percent since early 2023, when the commercial breakthrough of large language models such as ChatGPT triggered a rush by tech firms and governments to build out AI infrastructure. Thus far in 2025, its stock has risen by about 20 percent in value.
With Wednesday’s performance, Nvidia is now the fastest company ever to grow from $1 trillion to $4 trillion in market capitalization. It first reached the $1 trillion mark in June 2023 and surpassed $3 trillion in June 2024.
Nvidia is expected to keep growing as businesses and governments announce plans to invest billions in AI data centers in the coming years.
Despite concerns earlier this year about Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claimed its models could be trained with lower-end chips, Nvidia’s products have remained the industry standard.
The company has also weathered geopolitical headwinds, including U.S. export restrictions that limit sales of its most advanced chips to China.
Nvidia estimated in May that a ban on its H20 AI chips would result in an $8 billion loss in future revenue. The company previously reported a $2.5 billion revenue impact from restrictions in the most recent fiscal quarter.
Even missing out on billions in sales didn’t stop the company from earning high profits.
On May 28, the company filed its first-quarter earnings report with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In its quarterly filing, Nvidia said that in the three-month period ending April 27, the company recorded a net income—or profit—of about $18.8 billion. That was an increase from about $14.9 billion profit in the same period in 2024.
Additionally, during the first quarter of 2025 alone, Nvidia reported taking in about $44.1 billion in revenue. That was nearly twice the about $26 billion the company took in during the same period the prior year.
