The rise and rise of Nvidia: The chip maker makes history as the first $5 trillion company

Semiconductor giant NVIDIA has achieved an unprecedented financial milestone, becoming the first publicly listed company in the world to reach a market capitalization of $5 trillion.

The historic surge stems largely from the high global demand for its high-performance Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that underpin the Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom. NVIDIA now stands as the single most influential company in the technology sector, surpassing the valuations of Apple and Microsoft.

A meteoric and unstoppable rise

NVIDIA's ascent to the $5 trillion mark on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, came only three months after the company first breached the $4 trillion threshold. The company's stock has soared roughly 12-fold since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

NVIDIA's H100 and the upcoming Blackwell processors have become the indispensable "engines" used to train virtually all major Large Language Models (LLMs), including those powering OpenAI's ChatGPT and Elon Musk's xAI.

CEO’s bold forecast

The record valuation was propelled by a keynote address from CEO Jensen Huang, who announced that NVIDIA has visibility into $500 billion in AI chip orders through 2026 and revealed plans to build seven AI supercomputers for the U.S. government.

At $5 trillion, NVIDIA's market cap now exceeds the combined value of all its major competitors (including AMD and Intel) and surpasses the total market value of the entire cryptocurrency market.

Geopolitical tensions and future scrutiny

NVIDIA’s dominance has placed it at the center of the global technology rivalry, particularly between the U.S. and China, with Washington placing export controls on its advanced chips to limit China's AI development. The move saw Nvidia’s Chinese market share reduce to zero.

Despite these challenges, competition from rivals like AMD and cloud providers like Google and Amazon opting to develop custom chips, NVIDIA maintains its leadership through superior hardware performance and its comprehensive CUDA software ecosystem, which creates high switching costs for major developers.