New York, October 29, 2025 – Nvidia Corporation, the Santa Clara, California-based semiconductor powerhouse, achieved a historic feat on Wednesday as its market capitalization crossed the $5 trillion threshold for the first time, cementing its position as the most valuable publicly traded company in history. The milestone was reached during early trading on the Nasdaq, where Nvidia’s shares jumped 4.91% to $210.90 per share, reflecting sustained investor confidence in artificial intelligence (AI) as the cornerstone of future technological and economic transformation.
The surge in Nvidia’s stock price added approximately $234 billion to its market value in a single session, pushing the total capitalization from $4.78 trillion at Tuesday’s close to $5.01 trillion by mid-morning. This achievement surpasses previous records held by tech giants such as Apple and Microsoft, both of which have hovered near but never breached the $4 trillion mark in recent years. Nvidia’s ascent underscores the explosive growth of the AI sector, where demand for high-performance computing hardware continues to outpace supply.
Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market is rooted in its graphics processing units (GPUs), which have become the de facto standard for training and deploying large-scale AI models. These chips power foundational systems behind generative AI applications, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama series. According to industry estimates from Gartner, Nvidia commands over 85% of the global market for AI accelerators, a position bolstered by years of research and development in parallel computing architectures originally designed for gaming and graphics rendering.
The company’s financial performance has been nothing short of extraordinary. In its most recent fiscal quarter ending July 2025, Nvidia reported revenue of $38.2 billion, a 122% increase year-over-year, with data center revenue—driven almost entirely by AI-related sales—accounting for $34.1 billion. Gross margins remained robust at 75.4%, reflecting pricing power in a supply-constrained market. Analysts project Nvidia’s full-year revenue for fiscal 2026 to exceed $160 billion, up from $130.5 billion in the prior year.
Several catalysts contributed to Wednesday’s breakout. Foremost among them was the announcement of a multi-year strategic partnership with Nokia, the Finnish telecommunications giant, to develop AI-optimized 6G infrastructure. Under the agreement, Nvidia will supply its Grace Blackwell superchips to power edge AI computing in Nokia’s global network deployments, with initial rollouts targeted for Europe and Southeast Asia by mid-2026. The deal, valued at an estimated $8–10 billion over five years, expands Nvidia’s footprint beyond hyperscale data centers into telecommunications, a sector increasingly reliant on real-time AI processing for network optimization and predictive maintenance.
Market sentiment was further buoyed by signals from Washington regarding potential relaxation of U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors to China. Nvidia has been effectively barred from selling its flagship H100, H200, and Blackwell-series GPUs in mainland China since late 2022, when the Biden administration imposed restrictions citing national security risks. The policy forced Nvidia to develop a downgraded variant, the H20, for the Chinese market, which generated only modest revenue due to performance limitations.
However, the incoming Trump administration has indicated a willingness to recalibrate these restrictions. During a campaign event in September, President-elect Donald Trump described AI leadership as “the new space race” and suggested that overly restrictive export controls could cede strategic advantage to Chinese competitors like Huawei and Biren Technology. Sources familiar with transition planning say Trump’s team is exploring a tiered licensing framework that would allow limited sales of high-end AI chips to vetted Chinese entities under strict end-use monitoring.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is scheduled to participate in bilateral discussions on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Busan, South Korea, this week. Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping are expected to address AI governance, semiconductor supply chains, and trade normalization during their meeting. While no formal announcement is anticipated, analysts believe even modest progress toward market re-entry could unlock tens of billions in deferred revenue for Nvidia, given China’s status as the world’s largest data center market.
In a move that stunned Wall Street, Nvidia disclosed plans last week to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI over the next four years, structured as a combination of cash, in-kind GPU compute credits, and joint R&D commitments. The partnership aims to co-develop next-generation AI supercomputers capable of training models with trillions of parameters, far surpassing current capabilities. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hailed the deal as “a definitive step toward artificial general intelligence,” while Huang described it as “securing the infrastructure backbone of the AI economy.”
The investment comes amid reports that OpenAI’s annual compute spend has surpassed $15 billion, with projections to reach $50 billion by 2028. Nvidia’s commitment effectively locks in a preferred supplier relationship, ensuring priority access to its latest hardware for OpenAI’s research and commercial deployments. The deal also includes provisions for revenue-sharing on enterprise AI services built atop OpenAI models running on Nvidia infrastructure.
Separately, Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment in Intel’s U.S.-based foundry operations, part of a broader public-private initiative under the CHIPS and Science Act to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The funding will support Intel’s expansion of 18A and 14A process nodes at facilities in Arizona and Ohio, with Nvidia securing guaranteed capacity for future chip production. The collaboration marks a rare détente between the two longtime rivals, united by shared interests in countering Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) near-monopoly on advanced logic fabrication.
TSMC, which manufactures the vast majority of Nvidia’s chips, has faced mounting geopolitical risks due to tensions over Taiwan. Nvidia’s diversification strategy now includes partnerships with Intel, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries, alongside a $10 billion commitment announced earlier this year to build AI supercomputing clusters in the United States using domestically produced components.
The broader market context remains supportive of Nvidia’s growth trajectory. Global spending on AI hardware is forecast to reach $300 billion annually by 2027, according to IDC, with cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud collectively planning capital expenditures exceeding $250 billion in 2026 alone—much of it directed toward Nvidia-powered systems. Enterprise adoption of generative AI is accelerating, with McKinsey estimating that 70% of Fortune 500 companies have deployed or are piloting AI solutions, driving demand for inference-optimized hardware like Nvidia’s recently launched L40S and B200 GPUs.
Despite its meteoric rise, Nvidia faces challenges. Supply chain constraints persist, with lead times for Blackwell-series chips extending beyond 12 months. Competitors such as AMD, Intel, and a host of well-funded startups—including Groq, Cerebras, and xAI—are intensifying efforts to erode Nvidia’s market share with alternative architectures. Regulatory scrutiny is also increasing, with the Federal Trade Commission reportedly examining Nvidia’s dominance in AI infrastructure for potential antitrust violations.
Valuation concerns have shadowed the stock, with Nvidia trading at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 48—elevated but below its peak of 75 during the 2023 AI hype cycle. Bulls argue that earnings growth will justify the premium, pointing to a projected 65% compound annual growth rate in data center revenue through 2028. Bears counter that any slowdown in AI spending or breakthrough in open-source hardware could trigger a sharp correction.
For now, the market has spoken decisively. Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation reflects not just its current earnings power but a collective bet on AI as the defining technology of the 21st century. From autonomous vehicles to drug discovery, scientific research to creative industries, Nvidia’s silicon underpins the computational foundation of this transformation.
As Jensen Huang stated in a memo to employees following the milestone, “We stand at the beginning of the AI industrial revolution. Every company will become an AI company, every application will be intelligent, and Nvidia will power the platforms that make it possible.”
With the APEC summit looming and major investments taking shape, Nvidia’s journey from a graphics card maker founded in 1993 to the world’s first $5 trillion company appears poised for further chapters. For investors, policymakers, and technologists alike, the message is clear: in the age of AI, Nvidia is not just participating—it is defining the future.
