Nvidia becomes first public company valued at $5 trillion

Nvidia, the biggest beneficiary of the ongoing AI boom, became the first publicly traded company to cross the $5 trillion market capitalization milestone.

The company’s shares rose more than 5.6% to $212.19 on Wednesday following news Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump said he planned to discuss the company’s Blackwell chip with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday.

Investors will likely also be excited that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday that the company expects sales of AI chips to be $500 billion and is building seven new supercomputers that will require thousands of Nvidia GPUs for the United States in areas such as security, energy and science. The company also announced Tuesday that it will invest $1 billion in Nokia and use some of its products to “enable communications service providers to launch AI-native 5G-Advanced and 6G networks on NVIDIA platforms.”

This milestone comes just three months after Nvidia became the first company to cross the $4 trillion milestone. The company’s stock has soared more than 50% so far this year, helped by insatiable demand for graphics processing units (GPUs), which are widely used in data centers for things like training large language models and inference. Nvidia’s GPUs are valuable because they are rare, and by trading them directly into ever-expanding data center plans, NVIDIA is ensuring they remain that way.

More generally, tech stocks have soared this year on optimism that AI technology will revolutionize industries around the world in the same way that the advent of the internet transformed business. The past year has seen a flurry of multibillion-dollar deals, some led by Nvidia, as investors seek to accelerate the development of data centers and infrastructure to build computational power for resource-intensive AI models. In September, Nvidia announced it would invest up to $100 billion over the next few years in OpenAI, another beneficiary of the AI ​​boom. At the time, the companies said they would deploy 10GW worth of Nvidia systems to power OpenAI’s systems.

With a market capitalization of $5 trillion, Nvidia is now worth more than the stock markets of all countries except the United States, China, and Japan combined.