The Chip Maker Behind the AI Boom Passes $3 Trillion, Overtaking Apple

Nvidia's stock has tripled in the past year on demand for the chips every AI company needs. It crossed $1 trillion twelve months ago, $2 trillion in February, and $3 trillion today — the fastest climb of any company in history.

Nvidia closed today worth more than $3 trillion, passing Apple to become the second-most-valuable company in the world, behind Microsoft. It was worth $1 trillion a year ago this week. No company has added $2 trillion in value that fast, and the reason is the same as it was then, only more so: every company building AI needs Nvidia's chips, and there are not enough of them.

Last month the company reported that its sales had more than tripled from a year earlier, to $26 billion in a quarter, most of it chips sold to data centers. Its chief executive, Jensen Huang, has taken to describing the business in the language of a new industrial revolution: the world, he says, is building "AI factories," and Nvidia sells the machinery. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are each spending tens of billions of dollars a year on the buildout, and a large share of it goes to one supplier.

The obvious question is whether it lasts. Nvidia's competitors, including AMD and the big cloud companies designing their own chips, are years behind but not standing still. And a stock that has tripled in a year is pricing in a future that has to arrive on schedule: the AI products that all those chips are being bought to run have, so far, made much less money than the chips themselves.

That is the bet the market is making today — that the spending is the beginning of something rather than the whole of it. The shovel seller has never been worth more than the miners.