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Apple on Friday briefly leapfrogged Nvidia to become the world’s most valuable company for the first time in more than a year, as investors gain confidence that the iPhone maker can stage an AI comeback while avoiding its Big Tech rivals’ huge and increasingly risky data centre spending.
Nvidia’s shares fell 2 per cent in New York on Friday, amid a broad sell-off in tech stocks after the debut of Chinese AI developer Moonshot’s new Kimi K3 model shook investor confidence in Silicon Valley’s trillion-dollar spending on AI infrastructure.
Apple, however, remained nearly flat, leaving its market capitalisation close to exceeding $5tn. Apple would be only the second company ever to reach the lofty price tag, after AI chipmaker Nvidia first hit the $5tn mark in October.
Nvidia’s market value slipped to $4.908tn by Friday’s close, narrowly ahead of Apple’s $4.902tn.
The iPhone maker is seen by some investors as a safe refuge in the AI trade, as it has not committed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on chips and data centres like its “hyperscaler” rivals Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Shares in Apple have soared about 20 per cent since late June, rebounding on hopes that it will be able to navigate soaring memory costs and recover lost ground in AI. A long-delayed revamp of Siri, the iPhone’s virtual assistant, was unveiled last month to broadly positive reviews.
Apple took the unprecedented step of raising iPad and Mac prices by as much as 20 per cent last month, as it warned of “an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage”.
The announcement sent its shares tumbling by the most since US President Donald Trump launched his “liberation day” tariffs last year.
But Apple stock soon rebounded, after the FT reported that it was in talks with the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from blacklisted Chinese supplier CXMT, which could help it ease rising component costs.
Since then, Wall Street has also cheered Apple’s legal challenge to OpenAI’s hopes of launching a new AI device to rival the iPhone, with a lawsuit alleging theft of trade secrets by former employees who went to work at the ChatGPT maker.
Signals from Chinese regulators that its new AI system could soon be available in the world’s largest smartphone market by volume have also boosted its stock.
On Friday analysts at HSBC, one of the few Wall Street brokers that did not already have a buy recommendation on Apple’s shares, upgraded its rating, saying the iPhone maker was “well placed to leverage its 2.5bn installed device base with its forthcoming revamped Apple Intelligence”.
“This AI boost comes at the right moment, when we think Apple has one of its most innovative product pipelines in place,” HSBC added, ahead of an expected launch of the first foldable iPhone in September.
At the same time, Apple was spending only 2.5 per cent of its forecast 2026 sales on capital expenditures such as AI data centres, compared with 39 per cent for the biggest hyperscalers, HSBC noted.
