NVIDIA Flirts With Being Most Valuable Company Ever As Stock Surges On AI Demand

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For a sliver of a moment, NVIDIA on Thursday became the most valuable company ever with a spike in share price sending its market cap to a staggering $3.92 trillion. The share price then dipped slightly, though NVIDIA still closed the day up 1.33%, good for a record high in market cap at $3.89 trillion to close out a trading day, and putting it within striking distance of another all-time record when the stock market opens back up on Monday.

Why not today? The 4th of July is a national holiday, and both the NASDAQ (where NVIDIA is traded under the stock symbol NVDA) and New York Stock Exchange are closed in observance of the holiday. So NVIDIA’s next opportunity to make history is at the end of the trading day on July 7, 2025.

The official record to beat at closing is $3.915 trillion, achieved by Apple late last year (after Microsoft had surpassed Apple at the start of 2024). Currently, Apple sits at a $3.19 trillion market cap.

For the most part, NVIDIA’s share price and resulting market cap have climbed over the past several years, driven in large part by booming AI demand. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang wisely (from a financial and investor standpoint) shifted the company’s main focus from gaming GPUs to AI chips for the data center, resulting in record quarterly earnings being the norm.

It also means that NVIDIA’s data center division is its biggest earner, which has been the case for quite some time, though the gap between the data center and gaming has never been bigger than it is right now. In its latest earnings report (posted in May), NVIDIA reported a little over $39.1 billion in data center revenue, compared to $3.76 billion from gaming.

The downside for gamers is that, once again, obtaining a higher-end GPU at a reasonable price is a challenge. You’d be hard pressed to find a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition in stock at Best Buy, for example, or a custom model from one of NVIDIA’s add-in board (AIB) partners selling at or near the same $1,999 MSRP.

Gamers have grown accustomed to a frustrating market for GPUs, though. Before the AI boom, cryptocurrency mining created a shortage. The strain on supply from crypto miners eased up when Bitcoin mining shifted to ASIC hardware, but now there’s a burgeoning market for AI, with tech companies at large scrambling to position themselves to ride the next big wave.

For NVIDIA, however, this means that a $4 trillion market cap is within sight. In a note to clients, Webush analyst Dan Ives said he expects NVIDIA to hit that mark by summer, followed by a $5 trillion market cap within the next year and a half, according to Yahoo Finance.

“We believe tech stocks will have a very strong second half of the year,” Ives wrote. “Our bullish view is that investors are still underestimating the tidal wave of growth on the horizon from the $2 trillion of spending over the next 3 years coming from enterprise and government spending around AI technology and use cases.”

We’ll see what this means for gaming in the months and years ahead, but for NVIDIA, AI is booming louder than any fireworks you’re likely to encounter today.