Nvidia Just Hit $5 Trillion Valuation

Five trillion dollars. That’s the new valuation of Nvidia, a chipmaker that once sold graphics cards to gamers and now shapes the world’s technological future. The company has just crossed that historic threshold, becoming the most valuable company in the world.

To put it in perspective, Nvidia is now worth more than the GDP of every country on Earth except the United States and China, according to World Bank data. Its rise has been so sharp that even seasoned Wall Street analysts are struggling to find comparisons.

The stock closed at around $207 a share, up 5.6% in a single day, fuelled by CEO Jensen Huang’s revelation of $500 billion in chip orders and fresh optimism about a potential return to the Chinese market.

This milestone comes just three months after Nvidia first crossed the $4 trillion mark. Its stock has already jumped more than 50% this year, driven by an almost unrelenting demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used across data centres for training large language models, inference, and more. That demand has translated directly into earnings, Nvidia’s data centre segment generated $115.2 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, up 142% from the previous year, and the company held an astonishing 98% share of the data centre GPU market in 2023.

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Nvidia’s GPUs are valuable because they’re scarce, and by trading them directly into an ever-inflating data-centre ecosystem, Nvidia is making sure they stay that way.

The company revealed that it has already sold over three million Blackwell GPUs this year alone, and that figure only accounts for the top four U.S. cloud-service providers. It’s a staggering number that captures how Nvidia has turned scarcity itself into strategy.

How its Gaming Chip Became the World’s Engine

The foundation for this moment of dominance was laid years ago. In the mid-2000s, while rivals like Intel focused on CPUs, Nvidia doubled down on GPUs, chips designed for video rendering but capable of handling massive amounts of parallel processing. Jensen Huang later explained the thinking behind that pivot: “We believed that the pace of computing would outstrip CPU capacity and make our GPUs inevitable.” Nvidia’s risky bet was that those same chips would one day train machines to think. That gamble paid off.

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded in late 2022, Nvidia’s GPUs were already the preferred hardware for large-scale model training. The company had not only the chips but also CUDA, a proprietary software layer that made AI computing faster and more efficient. Within a year, its sales multiplied. According semiconductor analyst firm TechInsights, Nvidia's data-centre GPU shipments grew, totalling roughly 3.76 million units, over a million more than in 2022. This shows how Nvidia has gone from powering games like Call of Duty to powering the future of computation itself.

The Chips Became Critical in the AI Arms Race

That transformation set the stage for what followed. By 2024, AI had become the defining industrial contest of the decade. Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were buying Nvidia chips by the millions to cater to growing AI demand, while governments also poured billions into AI infrastructure. Huang disclosed that companies are projected to spend $549 billion on AI data centres this year, more than double 2023 levels, according to Morgan Stanley.

Menawhile Nvidia is also spreading its tentacles in the AI value chain. The chip comoany recently announced seven AI supercomputers in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, and revealed new collaborations with Uber on robotaxis and a $1 billion investment in Nokia to help build AI-native 5G and 6G networks. The company also announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI, last month, which will add at least 10 gigawatts of data-centre capacity to support its AI systems. Together, these developments highlight Nvidia’s expanding role at the centre of the global AI infrastructure push.

The China Factor

But even with that global reach, Nvidia’s next big move may be its most politically charged yet. Despite U.S.-China trade tensions, Nvidia reached an agreement with the Trump administration to sell its chips to China under a new condition, 15% of all Chinese revenues would go to the U.S. government. Analysts estimate those sales could exceed $50 billion next year, a figure that helped send Nvidia’s stock up nearly 3% on Wednesday, closing at about $207 a share, after President Trump confirmed he would discuss the company’s Blackwell chips directly with President Xi Jinping.

This deal could define Nvidia’s next phase. Access to China’s vast market is crucial for its growth, but it also ties the company to political uncertainty that even its dominance can’t easily hedge against.

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The AI Bubble Worries

And despite all its triumphs, not everyone is convinced that this ascent is sustainable. Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation now exceeds the combined market caps of AMD, Intel, Broadcom, TSMC, and Qualcomm, a level of concentration that some economists say recalls the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Back then, tech stocks soared on promise rather than performance, a pattern critics fear may be repeating with artificial intelligence.

Bob O’Donnell, president of TECHnalysis Research, cautions that “converting AI’s early wow moments into real productivity gains is taking much longer than expected.” That warning tracks with broader market sentiment: despite record AI spending, real-world business adoption remains tepid. An 2025 MIT study, “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” found that despite significant investment, 95% of companies running generative AI pilots have seen no measurable impact on their profit and loss statements. In other words, much of today’s AI enthusiasm has yet to translate into actual returns.

Even Nvidia’s own position highlights that circularity. Its recent $100 billion investment in OpenAI, for instance, indirectly flows back to Nvidia, funding data centres that then purchase Nvidia’s chips. That feedback loop, while lucrative in the short term, raises questions about whether the boom is being fuelled by genuine demand or industry self-reinforcement.

Still, CEO Jensen Huang dismisses talk of a bubble: “These companies are generating real revenues, and the products they are selling are profitable.” For now, the profitability of AI is still highly debated.

The Road Ahead

Yet, whatever the risks, the numbers keep favouring Nvidia. The company expects $26 billion in profit this quarter, outpacing Apple and Meta’s forecasts, according to The New York Times. Its dominance has effectively created a new layer of the global economy. Harvard economist Jason Furman noted that data-centre spending, most of it Nvidia-driven, accounted for 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Without it, he said, “the economy would have grown by just 0.1%.”

Nvidia’s influence now stretches far beyond Silicon Valley. Microsoft, Oracle, and even traditional industries like energy and transport are building infrastructure around its chips. As Huang put it, Nvidia has become “as essential to the future as electricity.”

What happens next will hinge on whether AI delivers measurable returns beyond hype and market momentum. If it does, Nvidia’s valuation might prove to be the early baseline for a new industrial age. If not, it could be the crest before a correction.

Nvidia’s $5 trillion milestone marks more than market history, it’s a snapshot of a world reorganising itself around computation, where one company’s chips quietly run everything from search engines to supercomputers.