Nvidia stock surged more than 2% on Wednesday, pushing the company’s market capitalization past $4 trillion for the first time ever, as investors continued to pile into the chipmaker powering the generative AI boom.
The milestone makes Nvidia the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Apple, both of which had previously crossed the $3 trillion mark.
Microsoft, one of Nvidia’s largest customers, is heavily reliant on the company’s GPUs to power its AI infrastructure.
AI demand fuels historic rally
Nvidia’s ascent has been driven by insatiable demand for its graphics processing units, the hardware backbone of large language models and generative AI systems like ChatGPT.
Since the launch of OpenAI’s chatbot in late 2022, Nvidia has emerged as the dominant force in AI computing.
Founded in 1993 and based in California, Nvidia first hit the $2 trillion mark in February 2024 and crossed $3 trillion in early June.
The company’s stock has gained more than fifteenfold over the past five years, including a 22% jump year-to-date and a 15% gain in the past month alone.
The rally has come in spite of persistent geopolitical tensions and US export restrictions that have limited Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced chips to China.
Last month, Nvidia said a new US ban on shipments of its China-specific H20 chips would cost the company $8 billion in lost revenue.
Still, investor sentiment remains bullish on the company’s long-term prospects as AI adoption accelerates globally and capital spending on infrastructure soars.
Citi hikes Nvidia stock price target
Citi sees growing upside for Nvidia as the chipmaker capitalizes on a global wave of sovereign AI investment and scales its Blackwell architecture.
Earlier in the week, analyst Atif Malik raised his price target on the stock to $190 from $180.
In a note to clients on Monday, Malik pointed to accelerating demand from governments building national AI infrastructure.
“We believe sovereign demand is already contributing up to billions of dollars in 2025 and expect the mix of sovereign AI sales to step up in 2026,” he wrote.
Nvidia, according to Malik, has visibility into “10s of gigawatts” of AI factory buildouts from enterprise and sovereign clients.
He estimates that 1 gigawatt of such demand could translate to as much as $50 billion in Nvidia sales.
Malik now sees Nvidia’s total addressable market for data centre, semiconductors, and AI businesses reaching $563 billion by 2028, a 13% increase from his prior forecast.
He also raised his networking segment estimate to $119 billion from $90 billion, citing demand for larger AI training clusters and intra-networking infrastructure.
The Blackwell ramp-up remains a key catalyst for Nvidia’s continued growth, Malik added.
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