Apple surpassed Nvidia as the world's most valuable company.

• On Friday, Nvidia surpassed Apple in market value to become the world's most valuable publicly traded company.
• The demand for the company's graphics processing units has led to a nearly tripling of its stock price in 2024.
• Nvidia briefly topped Apple in June.

On Tuesday, the company passed in market cap and became the most-valuable publicly traded company in the world for a second time.

In 2024, Nvidia's shares tripled, reaching a market cap of $3.43 trillion, surpassing Apple's market cap of $3.4 trillion. This growth was fueled by the company's continued success in the graphics processing units (GPUs) and artificial intelligence markets.

Despite the recent release of the Apple Intelligence suite of features for iPhones, many analysts predict that the company's shares will increase by 17% this year, making it a leader in "edge AI," which is less reliant on GPU-based servers.

Nvidia's stock has increased by more than 2,700% in the last five years, and its revenue has doubled in each of the past five quarters, tripling in three of them. Nvidia is the leading supplier of GPUs, which are used to develop and deploy advanced AI software like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Apple was the first company to reach a $1 trillion and a $2 trillion market cap. Nvidia previously surpassed Apple in June but later declined over the summer. With a market cap of nearly $3.1 trillion, Nvidia is a significant customer of Nvidia GPUs, which it uses to fuel its partnership with OpenAI and its own AI aspirations.

Since its inception in 1991 to produce chips for 3D gaming, Nvidia has experienced significant growth in recent years due to a different reason. In the past decade, researchers discovered that Nvidia's chip designs, which excel at rendering polygons and computer graphics, are also ideal for the parallel processing required for AI. As a result, Nvidia developed specialized software and more powerful chips for AI applications.

Apple reported a 6% increase in revenue for the most recent quarter, but analysts expected weaker growth in the current period. Nvidia is scheduled to report results on Nov. 20.

On Friday, the S&P Dow Jones announced that Nvidia will be joining the Dow Industrial Average, replacing a long-standing competitor, and joining Apple in the prestigious blue-chip index.

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