Nvidia becomes first public company worth $5 trillion

The biggest beneficiary of the ongoing AI boom, Nvidia has become the first public company to pass the $5 trillion market cap milestone.

The company’s shares rose more than 5.6% on Wednesday to as much as $212.19, on the back of news on Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump said he expects to discuss the company’s Blackwell chips with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday.

Investors are also likely stoked by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s comments on Tuesday that the company expects $500 billion in AI chip sales, and that it is building seven new supercomputers for the U.S. in areas like security, energy, and science that will require thousands of Nvidia GPUs. The company on Tuesday also said it had invested $1 billion in Nokia and would use some of its products to “enable communication service providers to launch AI-native 5G-Advanced and 6G networks on NVIDIA platforms.”

The milestone comes just three months after Nvidia became the first company to cross the $4 trillion milestone. Its stock has surged more than 50% so far this year, buoyed by seemingly insatiable demand for its graphics processing units (GPU), which are being used widely in data centers for training large language models, inference and more. Nvidia’s GPUs are valuable because they’re scarce — and by trading them directly into an ever-inflating data center scheme, Nvidia is making sure they stay that way.

More generally, tech stocks have surged this year on optimism that AI tech stands to revolutionize industries across the world, similar to how the advent of the internet changed business. Over the past year, investors have been encouraged by a spree of multi-billion-dollar deals — several of which had Nvidia at the center — to spur the development of data centers and infrastructure to build the compute capacity for resource-intensive AI models. In September, Nvidia announced that it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, another beneficiary of the AI boom, in the coming years. Both companies said at the time that they intend to deploy 10GW worth of Nvidia systems to power OpenAI’s systems.

With a market cap of $5 trillion, Nvidia is now worth more than the aggregated stock markets of all countries, apart from the United States, China and Japan.