Silicon Supremacy

Nvidia has reached a historic milestone, briefly surpassing a $4 trillion market capitalisation on Wednesday, making it the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. This moment reflects not only the extraordinary rise of the semiconductor giant but also the overwhelming market confidence in the continued dominance of artificial intelligence (AI) as a transformative force across industries.

Founded in 1993 and once primarily known for making graphics cards for gaming, Nvidia has transformed into the beating heart of the AI revolution. Its powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) have become indispensable for training large language models, powering data centres, and enabling next-generation AI applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to medical research. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, demand for Nvidia’s chips has surged exponentially, with the company becoming the leading supplier of the core infrastructure for generative AI.

On Wednesday, Nvidia shares rose by as much as 2.8%, hitting a record intraday high of $164.42, and briefly pushing the company’s market capitalisation above the $4 trillion mark. Though the stock ended the day with a 1.8% gain and a closing market cap of $3.97 trillion, the symbolic crossing of the $4 trillion threshold solidified Nvidia's place in financial history. The chipmaker outpaced tech titans Apple and Microsoft, which had previously crossed the $3 trillion mark and, for a time, held the title of the world’s most valuable companies. Microsoft, currently Nvidia’s key client and partner in the AI space, closed the day with a market cap of $3.74 trillion.

The scale and speed of Nvidia's rise are staggering. It hit a $1 trillion valuation in June 2023, tripled that figure by June 2025, and briefly added another trillion within a month. Its stock has soared more than fifteenfold over the last five years, and over 22% since the beginning of 2025 alone. The company's rally has come despite global market headwinds, including US-China trade tensions and export restrictions that have dented its sales in one of the world's largest markets.

One of the more significant roadblocks Nvidia faced came earlier this year when the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek unveiled a low-cost large language model that cast doubts on whether expensive GPU-based models would remain necessary for advanced AI development. This development, along with Washington’s decision to restrict Nvidia's chip exports to China — including the specialised H20 chips — led to a steep 37% drop in Nvidia's stock between January and April. The company estimated that it lost $2.5 billion in revenue in the last quarter due to these restrictions, and expects an additional $8 billion loss from future China sales. CEO Jensen Huang called the Chinese market “effectively closed” and said that being blocked from it would be a “tremendous loss.”

Yet the company has rebounded powerfully, with a roughly 74% gain from its April lows. Investors appear confident that the global appetite for AI infrastructure will continue to grow rapidly, offsetting regional losses. According to International Data Corporation, spending on AI infrastructure is expected to exceed $200 billion by 2028. Nvidia’s performance underscores the belief that it is poised to capture a dominant share of that growth, aided by what many analysts describe as a near-monopolistic hold on the market for AI chips.

Nvidia reported an astonishing $44.1 billion in revenue in the quarter ending April 2025, a 69% jump year-over-year. The company projects revenue of approximately $45 billion for the second quarter, and its Blackwell Ultra chip, unveiled in March, is expected to significantly bolster performance for complex AI tasks. CEO Jensen Huang has described AI as a foundational technology for virtually every sector, from finance and healthcare to manufacturing and transportation. In his view, the world is only at the beginning of a global transformation that will be powered by AI, and Nvidia will be at its core.

Huang himself has become a symbolic figure of the AI era, recently ranked by Bloomberg as the tenth wealthiest person in the world with a net worth of $140 billion. He has engaged closely with political leadership and has participated in initiatives such as Project Stargate — a $500 billion AI infrastructure program touted by the administration as a national priority.

Despite concerns around valuation, Nvidia still trades at a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 32, below its three-year average of 37, according to LSEG data. Wall Street analysts remain bullish, with Loop Capital projecting a $6 trillion valuation by 2028. The company now comprises 7.3% of the S&P 500 index, more than the entire public equity markets of countries like the UK, Canada, or Mexico. Its dominance has implications far beyond the tech sector, with ripple effects across the financial world and global geopolitics.

Nvidia’s climb to the $4 trillion club marks more than just a market milestone — it signals the ascendance of AI as the defining technological and economic force of the next decade. Whether or not it maintains its lead amid growing competition from rivals like AMD and evolving regulatory scrutiny, Nvidia’s role in ushering in the AI era is already cemented.