NVIDIA Ousts Apple as the Second-Most Valuable US Company

NVIDIA, following its massive success amid the AI boom, has ousted Apple to become the second-most valuable company in the US.

First reported by CNBC News, NVIDIA's shares surged past $3.1 trillion on Wednesday, overtaking Apple's $3 trillion market cap, three months after it first beat Google and Amazon as the third-biggest.

Microsoft remains the most valuable company in the country with a $3.15 trillion market value.

A big contributor to its massive success over the past two years is the surge in demand for AI chips, generating NVIDIA $26.04 billion last April.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang touted the company's tripled growth as the result of the chip manufacturer providing "a new commodity" to AI firms and data centers.

NVIDIA Rolls Out More Advanced AI Chips

NVIDIA's record-high market surge follows just days after Huang announced the new advanced AI chip, Rubin, set to release sometime in 2026.

Similar announcements in the past have seen a surge in the company's stocks with the Blackwell chip platform reveal in February recording a $277 billion shares increase in a single trading day.

This is not to mention that NVIDIA continues to drive up prices for its new advanced AI chips to cater to data centers looking to build more AI models.

In an interview with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street," Huang revealed that the price for a new Blackwell chip goes up from $30,000 to $40,000 per piece, ten times higher than its individual products.

Now, Huang is promising to build more chips suitable for "multimodal" AI models capable of understanding user-generated texts, audio, images, and videos in real-time.

Tech Giants Scramble to Look for NVIDIA Alternatives

The surge in NVIDIA's revenue was made despite tech giants scrambling to build their own AI chips or secure cheaper alternatives.

This is due to the speed and growing number of advanced AI chips companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Google are acquiring as they ramp up the production process to compete with each other.

While NVIDIA's rivals have been receiving more investments to keep up with the competition, the Santa Clara-based chipmaker remains the steady supplier for many in Silicon Valley.