Nvidia beats Microsoft to become world’s most valuable company

Nvidia

Nvidia has reclaimed the title of the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, surpassing Microsoft in market capitalization on Tuesday. According to a report by CNBC, shares of the AI chip giant rose by 3% to $141.40, pushing its market value to an astonishing $3.45 trillion — narrowly edging out Microsoft’s $3.44 trillion.

This marks another milestone in Nvidia’s rapid ascent, as the company continues to dominate the AI hardware landscape. Over the past month alone, its stock has surged nearly 24%, shrugging off concerns around export restrictions and global tariffs, as per the report.

Nvidia has been jockeying with Apple and Microsoft for the top spot in market cap rankings since mid-2023. It last held the crown on January 24 before Tuesday’s resurgence.

AI driving growth

Nvidia’s explosive growth continues to be driven by insatiable demand for its AI accelerators — chips powering everything from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to major AI infrastructure at Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and Elon Musk’s xAI. These companies are pouring billions into building massive computing clusters, all reliant on Nvidia’s hardware.

In its most recent earnings report, Nvidia posted $44.06 billion in revenue and 96 cents in adjusted earnings per share for its fiscal Q1 — a 69% year-over-year revenue jump, remarkable for a company of its size.

Originally founded in 1993 to build graphics chips for gaming, Nvidia has become the silicon backbone of the AI revolution. Its GPUs, once designed to render lifelike 3D images, are now essential tools for parallel data processing — the core computational task behind artificial intelligence.