Apple Nvidia market cap flip puts iPhone maker back on top
Apple closed at $4.95 trillion on Monday, passing Nvidia as AI chip stocks sold off and investors weighed AI spending costs.
By Dev Ramirez · Crypto Correspondent
· 3 min read
The Apple Nvidia market cap race flipped Monday, with Apple ending the session as the world’s most valuable company, according to CNBC. For everyday investors, the move shows how quickly market leadership can shift when Wall Street reassesses the cost of the artificial intelligence boom.
Apple shares rose 1% Monday, lifting the iPhone maker’s market capitalization to $4.95 trillion, CNBC reported. Nvidia shares fell 5%, leaving the AI chip company valued at $4.77 trillion.
Market capitalization, or market cap, is the stock market’s value of a company: share price multiplied by shares outstanding. It is the scoreboard investors use to rank public companies by size, though it does not measure profit, cash flow or business quality by itself.
CNBC reported that Monday marked the first time Apple closed above Nvidia in market value since April 2025. Nvidia had been in the top spot since June 2025, when it moved ahead of Microsoft, and the chipmaker briefly reached a $5 trillion valuation in October.
Why did Apple pass Nvidia by market cap?
The immediate reason was a split trading day: Nvidia sold off while Apple gained. CNBC reported that AI chip stocks broadly declined as investors worried about the large costs tied to building out AI infrastructure.
Apple has moved differently from many large tech peers in the AI race. According to CNBC, investors have rewarded the company’s reluctance to spend heavily on capital expenditures for AI. Capital expenditures, often called capex, are long-term investments such as data centers, servers and other infrastructure.
Rather than building all of its own AI capacity, Apple has preferred to rent capacity, CNBC reported. That approach has helped the stock outperform in 2026, with Apple shares up 24% so far this year, compared with a 4% gain for Nvidia, according to CNBC.
Nvidia remains central to the AI trade. CNBC reported that the company’s sales are in their third year of AI-driven growth, powered by demand for graphics processing units, or GPUs. GPUs are chips used to process many calculations at once, which makes them useful for training and running AI systems.
Investor attention, however, has broadened beyond GPUs. CNBC reported that many investors are now looking at memory chips and other data center infrastructure tied to AI demand, including companies such as Micron Technology, SK Hynix and Sandisk.
Apple’s next test comes Thursday, when it is set to report fiscal third-quarter earnings. CNBC reported that investors expect the company to show some of the financial impact from the AI-driven global memory chip shortage.
That shortage already affected customers, according to CNBC, which reported that Apple raised Mac and iPad prices in June after memory constraints hit the company. Thursday’s earnings report will give investors a clearer look at how much those supply pressures are showing up in Apple’s numbers.
This story draws on original reporting from CNBC.
