The number, and the day after
On July 9, 2025, Nvidia shares rose as much as 2.5% intraday to an all-time high of $164, which briefly pushed the company's market capitalization above $4 trillion for the first time for any publicly traded company. The stock gave back some of the move into the close, finishing the session at $162.88, up 1.8%, for a market cap of about $3.97 trillion: a record close, but short of the round number. [1][2]
Nvidia closed above $4 trillion the next day. On July 10, shares rose a further 0.75% to $164.10, putting the market cap at $4.004 trillion at the close, ahead of Microsoft ($3.73 trillion) and Apple ($3.17 trillion). The distinction between the intraday touch and the close matters for the record books: several outlets that ran with "Nvidia hits $4 trillion" on the 9th were describing a number that lasted minutes, not the closing figure that made it official the following day. [3]
A faster lap than Apple or Microsoft
Nvidia was not the first company to a trillion dollars, or even a third of the way there. Apple crossed $1 trillion in intraday trading on August 2, 2018, reached $2 trillion on August 19, 2020, and became the first company to $3 trillion in January 2022. Microsoft followed Apple to $3 trillion on January 24, 2024, becoming the second company ever to clear that bar. Both had taken roughly two years to add each successive trillion once they were in the club. [4]
Atlas interpretation: Nvidia's own climb was newer and choppier. It first reached $1 trillion in June 2023 and $3 trillion in June 2024, then fell back out of the $3 trillion club during the January DeepSeek selloff and April's tariff and export-control slide before rejoining it in May 2025. From there it took under two months to add a fourth trillion, a pace neither Apple nor Microsoft matched, but the sources obscure how unsteady the path there actually was: this was not a smooth compounding story so much as two sharp drops and a recovery that outran both prior leaders. [1][5]
What was actually buying the chips
The immediate fuel was Nvidia's own numbers. Fiscal first-quarter results reported May 28, 2025 showed revenue of $44.1 billion, up 69% year over year, with data center revenue of $39.1 billion, up 73%. That was despite a $4.5 billion charge tied to new U.S. export licensing requirements on H20 chips sold into China, announced in April. Guidance for the following quarter was $45.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, a figure the company said already priced in roughly $8 billion of lost H20 revenue from the export controls. [6]
That guidance mattered because it showed the underlying data center business absorbing an $8 billion China shortfall and still guiding up. The demand behind it was big cloud provider capital spending: Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI's infrastructure partners were committing hundreds of billions of dollars to data center buildouts running on Nvidia chips, which Jensen Huang described as "incredibly strong" global demand around the milestone. [2]
The theory this quietly refuted
Atlas interpretation: Five and a half months earlier, on January 27, Nvidia had lost roughly $600 billion of market value in a single session on the theory that DeepSeek's cheaply trained R1 model proved frontier AI no longer needed as many advanced chips. Jensen Huang argued at the time that the market had the model backward: investors had assumed a world of pretraining followed by inference, when reasoning models added a third phase, post-training and test-time scaling, that also consumed large amounts of compute. "I think the market responded to R1 as an 'Oh my gosh, AI is finished,'" he said in comments reported that February. [7][8]
Atlas interpretation: The stock did not recover in a straight line. It fell again in April on Trump administration tariff announcements and the H20 export licensing requirement, a separate shock that cost Nvidia the $4.5 billion charge described above. By late June it had gained 66% from that April low, retaking the world's-most-valuable-company title from Microsoft at a $3.8 trillion valuation, before crossing $4 trillion two weeks later. Two distinct scares in five months, both read at the time as evidence that AI infrastructure spending was about to slow, and neither one did: by July the spending had instead compounded past both selloffs. [5]
Skepticism at the time, and the sequel four months later
Not every voice treated the run as obviously durable while it was happening. Dan Davidowitz of Polen Capital, discussing the stock as it approached $4 trillion, said "the valuation depends on the persistence of growth" and noted Nvidia's largest customers were "trying to figure out ways to be more efficient with their spending," a caution about customer concentration and capital discipline rather than a call that the rally was fake. At the time Nvidia traded around 32 times forward earnings against roughly 22 times for the S&P 500, a premium that priced in continued outsized growth rather than a pause. [5]
Atlas interpretation: The question Davidowitz raised, whether the spending would persist, got an early answer fast. Less than four months later, on October 29, 2025, Nvidia closed above five trillion dollars, the same demand story extended by another trillion rather than interrupted. Read from July, four trillion looked like a peak reached against skepticism. Read from October, it looked like a waypoint: the milestone this page describes turned out to be roughly the market's mid-2025 opinion, not its final one. [9]
Sources
- Nvidia becomes first US company to reach $4 trillion market cap
Al Jazeera · Jul 9, 2025
- Nvidia becomes first company worth $4 trillion: What to know
NBC News · Jul 9, 2025
- Nvidia closes at record $4-trillion market cap, pulling further ahead of rivals in AI race
The Globe and Mail · Jul 10, 2025
- How Nvidia became a trillion-dollar company
CIO · Sep 8, 2026
- Nvidia breakout puts $4 trillion market value within reach
Fortune · Jun 27, 2025
- NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for First Quarter Fiscal 2026
NVIDIA · May 28, 2025
- Nvidia sheds almost $600 billion in market cap, biggest one-day loss in U.S. history
CNBC · Jan 27, 2025
- Jensen Huang says investors got it wrong over DeepSeek stock selloff that wiped $600B from Nvidia
Fortune · Feb 21, 2025
- Nvidia nearly went under 3 years into its existence, now it's the world's first-ever $5 trillion company
CNBC · Oct 30, 2025