Why Nvidia is now worth more than Apple: The $4 trillion AI chip story

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Taiwanese-American engineer Jensen Huang. (Courtesy: Reuters photo)

Nvidia on Wednesday became the first-ever company to breach a market capitalization of $4 trillion, a record growth fuelled by the AI mania sweeping across the world. The Santa Clara-based chipmaker surpassed technology giants Apple and Microsoft to become the Nasdaq's number one, finishing at $162.88 a share, according to the Wall Street Journal.

From gaming origins to AI supremacy

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Taiwanese-American engineer Jensen Huang. It formerly produced graphics chips for PC gaming. However, Huang wagered early on an even more ambitious vision: that the very same GPUs powering video games would also speed up data centres and AI workloads. That bet has yielded generous returns. The company's GPUs now power generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and countless others.

A meteoric ascent powered by AI

Nvidia was worth $1 trillion only two years ago. Expansion since then has been exponential. Nvidia alone registered $44.1 billion in revenue in fiscal Q1 2025—compared to only $7.2 billion two years earlier. Gross margins are in excess of 70%. Chip sales like the Hopper H100 and more recently, the Blackwell B200 with 208 billion transistors, have been almost around-the-clock.

Big tech fuels the boom of the chip

The rise of AI chatbots and large language models has sparked a hardware arms race. Meta, OpenAI, and Google have been racing to secure tens of thousands of Nvidia chips. The GPUs cost some of them over $40,000 each, but technology firms boast openly about how much they're buying and how much they hope their AI ambitions are famous.

China and rivals defy

Nvidia's path has not been unblemished. Trump and Biden administrations' U.S. export bans have blocked sales of advanced AI chips to China, which classified them as strategic technologies. This led Nvidia to take a $5.5 billion write-down on chips that it could no longer ship. Another bout of competition has also emerged—namely from China, where Huawei is complementing the gap left by export controls.

Momentum builds

Despite such setbacks, Nvidia has continued to drive its chip launch cycle faster and more furiously, aiming for a new architecture annually. Its revenue-per-employee even outpaces Microsoft and Alphabet these days, showing just how profitable its niche has proven to be. Jensen Huang, now globally famous, is the one who gets credit for making Nvidia the go-to provider of the AI era.

While the AI era keeps reshaping industries, Nvidia looks firmly at the centre of it all—not so much a chipmaker anymore but the bedrock of the future.