Apple had a great day in the stock market on Wednesday, with its market capitalization once again surpassing the $3 trillion mark. But chip-maker Nvidia had an even better day and passed Apple’s market cap for the first time ever.
The result is that Apple, which spent years as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, is now in third place. To see how Apple’s apple market cap has evolved over time, check out this detailed analysis.
UPDATE June 6: The funny part about stocks is they go up and down. The market capitalization of both Apple and Nvidia dropped below $3 trillion on Thursday. But NVDA dropped even more so AAPL is once again the second most valuable publicly traded company behind Microsoft.
Ka-CHING! Apple market cap again over $3 trillion
Apple’s share price has had an up-and-down couple of years. At the beginning of 2022, it passed the $3 trillion mark, the first publicly traded company to do so. Exactly a year later, it was below $2 trillion amidst a general pessimism about tech stocks. Then in December 2023 it went back over $3 trillion but quickly dropped below that.
It’s back over the mark as of the close of trading on Wednesday. The Mac-maker is currently valued at $3.003 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance.
Apple passed the market cap milestone after rising in value 0.23% during the day. But Nvidia increased in value a whopping 5.16% on the same day so the chip-maker is now valued at $3.012 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance.
While that puts NVDA ahead of AAPL, there’s another stock symbol that can’t overlooked: MSFT. Microsoft currently has a market cap of $3.15 trillion, again according to Yahoo Finance.
That makes Nvidia the new second most valuable publicly traded company and pushed Apple to third place, even though it’s once again a $3 trillion company.
AI. It’s all about AI.
The market capitalization of all three of the Big Tech companies has been on the rise. Apple’s share price rose 9.3% in the past year, Microsoft’s went up 27.1% over the same time period, but Nvidia shot up an astounding 216.8%. The reason for all of these is the same: investors’ enthusiasm about artificial intelligence.
In 2023, Microsoft bought a large chunk of OpenAI, the company that touched off the current AI boom by launching ChatGPT. It’s share price is up almost 50% since then.
Nvidia makes processors that power the data centers that run artificial intelligence software used by multiple companies. Its share price has gone up over 550% in the past two years.
Apple was behind the curve on AI, which is why its stock value dropped earlier this year. But the many, many recent leaks revealing the new AI features coming soon to iPhone and Mac have returned investor enthusiasm to the stock.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
