Nvidia has become the first $4 trillion public company, driven by explosive AI demand, dominance in chipmaking, and surging market forecasts fueled by its new Blackwell hardware platform. (Source: Image by RR)

Global AI Ambitions Are Driving Unprecedented Chip Orders and Data Center Expansion

Nvidia has officially become the first publicly traded company to reach a staggering $4 trillion market valuation, a meteoric rise fueled by its dominance in the AI chip sector. As demand for AI infrastructure skyrockets, Nvidia’s advanced GPUs are now central to everything from cloud computing and large language models to autonomous vehicles and national AI programs. Its stock hit a record $164 this week, with a valuation increase that now places it ahead of Apple and Microsoft on the S&P 500.

This milestone, as noted in interestingengineering.com, underscores Nvidia’s transformation from a graphics chip innovator into a foundational pillar of the modern AI ecosystem. Just one year ago, it crossed the $1 trillion mark—since then, it has tripled its worth at a pace unmatched even by the tech giants. Nvidia now holds a 7.3% share of the S&P 500 index, a higher weighting than either Apple or Microsoft, and its valuation exceeds the entire public markets of the UK, Canada, and Mexico combined.

Central to this valuation surge is Nvidia’s next-generation “Blackwell” chip platform, designed to handle unprecedented AI training and inference workloads. Tech powerhouses like Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Tesla are snapping up supply to support everything from generative AI to full-stack autonomous systems. This voracious demand has analysts projecting massive future gains, with some price targets now extending toward $250 a share—suggesting Nvidia could hit a $6 trillion valuation within the year.

Despite some geopolitical risks and competition from emerging players like China’s DeepSeek, Nvidia has continued to surge thanks to booming earnings, bullish analyst forecasts, and its unmatched role in the AI hardware stack. According to some estimates, every $1 spent on Nvidia chips sparks an $8–10 ripple through the broader tech industry. Even as the stock trades at a price-to-earnings ratio below its three-year average, it remains the undisputed cornerstone of the AI gold rush.

read more at interestingengineering.com