NVIDIA Regains Title as World's Most Valuable Company, Surpassing Apple

Barron's reported that NVIDIA (NVDA-US) saw its stock price rise by 2.9% on Friday (May 31), closing at $200.75 per share, boosting its market capitalization to $4.86 trillion. At a time when Apple's stock was heavily sold off following its earnings release, NVIDIA's market value once again overtook Apple's, reclaiming the top spot as the world's most valuable company.

Apple had briefly held the title of the world's most valuable company, but faced selling pressure immediately after releasing its earnings report on Thursday. On Friday, its shares dropped as much as 10% during trading, though the decline narrowed slightly by the close, bringing its market value down to approximately $4.51 trillion.

Meanwhile, Amazon's (AMZN-US) earnings report and capital expenditure plans have once again highlighted the critical role of NVIDIA's chips amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

Amazon raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast from $200 billion to $220 billion, while downplaying the competitive tension between its in-house AI chips and NVIDIA's offerings.

Amazon CEO Andrew R. Jassy stated during the earnings call that the company maintains a deep collaboration with NVIDIA and will continue to position its cloud computing platform, AWS, as the optimal environment for running NVIDIA chips. He noted that, for the foreseeable future, a large number of customers will continue to adopt NVIDIA processors.

However, the potential threat posed by Amazon's self-developed chips has not disappeared. Recent market rumors suggest Amazon may begin directly selling its Trainium AI chips—originally designed primarily for internal AWS use—to external customers, thereby expanding the competitive arena with NVIDIA.

Jassy confirmed that an increasing number of customers are expressing interest in accessing Amazon's AI training technology and chips separately from AWS cloud services. The company is now engaging in discussions with these clients and evaluating feasibility, and he believes there is indeed potential to launch this business in the future.