The Nvidia juggernaut continues to roll and decimate records. On Wednesday, the company founded by Jensen Huang made history by becoming the first in the world to reach a market value of US$5 trillion.
Nvidia shares closed at US$207.04, up 2.99 per cent after reaching a day’s high of US$212.19. At the end of trading, that implied a market capitalisation of US$5.03 trillion.
The latest milestone comes just three months after Nvidia breached the US$4 trillion mark, and within 29 months of first reaching the US$1 trillion value in June 2023.
It took Nvidia 180 days to double its market cap from US$1 trillion to US$2 trillion, but only 66 days to grow from US$2 trillion to US$3 trillion. The latest jump from US$4 trillion to US$5 trillion was achieved in 78 days.
The chipmaker has ridden the artificial intelligence boom that has been all the talk since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT towards the end of 2022. The stock has gained more than 50 per cent this year and more than 1,500 per cent over the last five years, compared to the S&P 500 gaining only 17 per cent this year, and the Nasdaq just 23 per cent.
The value of Nvidia alone is now worth more than the GDP of every country on earth, except for the United States and China, according to World Bank data.
The combined market values of all its competitors — Broadcom (US$1.822 trillion), TSMC (US$1.582 trillion), AMD (US$428.96 billion), ASML (US$415.64 billion), Micron (US$254.38 billion), Lam Research (US$201.8 billion), Intel (US$197.02 billion), Qualcomm (US$192.78 billion) and Arm Holdings (US$180.48 billion) – is US$5.27 trillion.
On Tuesday, Huang had announced US$500 billion in AI chip orders and said he plans to build seven supercomputers for the US government. The latest surge was also aided by a slew of partnerships and investments that was revealed by Huang at the company’s annual AI conference in Washington, which included a $US1 billion investment in Finnish 5G network supplier Nokia and new partnerships with OpenAI and drugmaker Eli Lilly.
At current prices, Reuters has estimated that the stake of Taiwan-born Huang in Nvidia would be worth about US$179.2 billion. He founded the company in 1993 and under his leadership, the company’s H100 and Blackwell processors have become the engines behind large-language models powering tools such as ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s xAI.
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