Nvidia share price soars as US chipmaker becomes first company valued at $US5 trillion
Its technology is so advanced that successive U.S. administrations have imposed export controls on national security grounds to restrict China from importing the most technologically capable chips.
But Nvidia’s shares rose on Wednesday after U.S. President Donald Trump said the company expects to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the Blackwell chip. Trump said months ago that he would consider allowing Nvidia to export a downgraded version of the processor to China and hoped such a deal could be on the table.
US President Donald Trump with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in April.Credit: Bloomberg
Such an arrangement is unprecedented. In recent years, Nvidia has circumvented export restrictions by shipping low-end versions of its chips to the Chinese market; hamstrung technology has fallen short of state-of-the-art requirements that US administrations have specifically banned due to security concerns.
What is Nvidia’s share price?
Nvidia’s shares were trading at US$207.04 ($314.37) on Thursday morning (AEDT). The total market cap was US$5.054 trillion as of the opening of trading in the US on Wednesday.
Adding to the long-term AI boom and hopes of a deal with Beijing, Nvidia this week announced $500 billion in chip orders. In the last two months, it has also announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI, a partnership with Uber on robotaxi, and a $1 billion investment in Nokia to work together on 6G technology.
How much is 5 trillion dollars?
Compared to the value of other companies, Nvidia’s growth is quite significant.
That’s 33 times bigger than mining giant BHP, which is Australia’s largest non-bank public company and has a relatively modest market capitalization of $226 billion. It is approximately 26 times larger than the Commonwealth Bank, the largest company in our market.
In fact, that’s roughly twice the size of Australia’s entire share market. The value of All Ordinaries, which tracks the value of the 500 largest companies in the market and makes up nearly 90 percent of the ASX, is approximately $3.4 trillion.
To put it in perspective, Nvidia’s value compares more closely with the output of some of the world’s major economies.
This figure is larger than the gross domestic product of Japan, the world’s fourth-largest economy, at US$4.28 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund. This is the same as Germany’s entire economic output.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang.Credit: Bloomberg
What other companies are worth more than $1 trillion?
Only a handful of publicly traded companies have reached a valuation above $1 trillion, and most of them were technology firms.
As of Tuesday’s close, the S&P 500’s most valuable companies included Microsoft at $4.04 trillion and Apple at $3.99 trillion. Alphabet (which owns Google), Amazon and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) have also reached this milestone.
Who is Nvidia’s CEO?
Founder Jensen Huang is known for his black leather jackets and tattoo that resembles the Nvidia logo.
He has previously talked about the philosophy he used to take the company to its current position. “Run, don’t walk,” he told university students in Taiwan in 2023. “You either run for food or you run away from being food.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang waves as US President Donald Trump speaks at an artificial intelligence conference in Washington in July.Credit: access point
Huang’s net worth is $178.9 billion Forbesplacing him eighth on the Realtime Billionaires List. Elon Musk is number 1 with $499.4 billion.
He met with Trump through his leadership at Nvidia and repeatedly called for loosening export restrictions on China; This development now seems to have brought the company to its highest point.
With AP and Bloomberg
