Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) became the world's first publicly-traded company to clock a $4 trillion market cap during intraday trading on 9 July 2025.
That's a big deal because NVDA recently vaulted past two other megacaps to claim the title. In recent years, both Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) jockeyed for the title of being the world's biggest publicly-traded company, only to have Nvidia blow past them in just the last month.
The rise of NVDA is an ongoing major story, not just in the current headlines, but also in the history of stocks. Here's how CNBC reported today's milestone achievement:
Nvidia stock rose on Wednesday lifting the company’s market cap briefly past $4 trillion for the first time as investors scooped up shares of the tech giant that’s building the bulk of the hardware for the generative artificial intelligence boom.
However, Nvidia stock ended finishing the day only up 1.8%, giving the company a market cap of $3.97 trillion.
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, both of which hit the $3 trillion mark before Nvidia. Microsoft is also one of Nvidia’s biggest and most important customers. The chipmaker is the first company to ever achieve this market value during trading.
What makes this accomplishment more amazing is that NVDA's market cap has been remarkably volatile in recent months, especially after 20 February 2025, when the company behind China's DeepSeek artificial intelligence system announced they would make their code open source. That hurt NVDA's market valuation because DeepSeek's AI-code doesn't need to run on Nvidia's powerful AI-chips.
NVDA's market cap went from $3.4 trillion on 20 February 2025 down to a low of $2.6 trillion on 10 March 2025. The stock recovered a bit after that, rising back to $2.96 trillion on 24 March 2025. But then it plunged again in the reaction to President Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement on 2 April 2025. By 4 April 2025, NVDA's valuation totaled $2.30 trillion.
But then the company's valuation recovered, adding more than $1.7 trillion during the last three months, which has put in on the doorstep of a $4 trillion market capitalization.
We've updated the interactive chart we posted a year earlier to include the new $4 trillion benchmark.
The chart doesn't fully communicate the volatility of NVDA's market cap because it is based on snapshots of its total valuation as a percentage of the S&P 500's total market capitalization taken at roughly mid-year over the past 10 years, skipping over almost all of the volatility. As for where it stands today, the latest snapshot indicates NVDA's stock alone accounts for 7.07% of the total valuation of the S&P 500 index.
That in itself is remarkable because that's less that the 7.25% we estimated a year ago. What's happened since then is that the rest of the stocks that make up the index have increased their relative share of the total valuation of the index, while previous market cap champions AAPL and MSFT have lost some of theirs.
That's an underappreciated story in the U.S. stock market, which we'll revisit in the months ahead.
Disclaimer: Aside from long positions in funds that track the S&P 500 index, we don't hold any position of any kind in either NVDA, AAPL, or MSFT. We simply find these megacap stocks to be interesting because of their influence on the index.
Image credit: Microsoft Bing Image Creator. Prompt: "An artificial intelligence computer chip with the letters NVDA in the middle." We originally featured this image on 26 February 2024.
Labels: market cap, stock market
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