On Wednesday, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach $4 trillion market valuation as shares rose more than 2 percent, reports CNBC. The GPU maker’s stock has climbed 22 percent since the start of 2025, continuing a trend driven by demand for AI hardware following ChatGPT’s late 2022 launch.
The milestone marks the highest market cap ever recorded for a publicly traded company, surpassing Apple’s previous record of $3.8 trillion set in December. Nvidia first crossed $2 trillion in February 2024 and reached $3 trillion just four months later in June. The $4 trillion valuation represents a market capitalization larger than the GDP of most countries.
As we explained in 2023, Nvidia’s continued success has been intimately tied to growth in demand for hardware that runs AI models as capably and efficiently as possible. The company’s data center GPUs excel at performing billions of matrix multiplications necessary to train and run neural networks due to their parallel architecture—hardware architectures that originated as video game graphics accelerators now power the generative AI boom.
Companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and others need tens of thousands of these specialized chips to power services like ChatGPT, AI image generators, and enterprise AI applications. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s CUDA platform (which makes developing AI applications that use GPUs easier) has become a de facto standard, creating a moat around its hardware ecosystem.
China restrictions and market resilience
It has been a roller-coaster year for Nvidia stock after multiple shocks. In January, a brief investor panic over the emergence of China’s DeepSeek model had some analysts suggesting it might reduce future AI chip requirements. In April, Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement caused Nvidia’s shares to dive even more dramatically, but the company’s valuation has gained more than 15 percent over the past month despite these episodes.
