Apple overtook the chipmaker Nvidia on Monday to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, about two years after it lost the crown.
The company’s ascent was as much a result of a sell-off of Nvidia’s stock as it was an endorsement by investors. Apple’s stock price finished the day up more than 1 percent, leading to a market valuation of $4.9 trillion. But Nvidia’s stock, driven by spending concerns, was down almost 5 percent, leading to a market cap of $4.8 trillion, according to Bloomberg.
Apple has sat on the sidelines of the artificial intelligence race for much of the past four years, leading to more frequent questions from investors about its plans. In 2024, after more than a decade at the top of the stock market, it lost the most-valuable-company crown to Microsoft.
While Apple’s reign over the stock market could be short-lived, it returned to the top as investors re-evaluate A.I. Earlier this month, stocks slid amid increasing concerns about spending on the technology and growing competition from China. As questions abound over whether the next big bet by the technology industry will pay off, investors appear to be returning to a safe gamble.
“Apple is a little bit of a flight to safety,” said Daniel Newman, the chief executive of Futurum Group, a technology analysis company. “People see the A.I. trade is volatile, and they see Apple as almost like owning an index,” he added.
In the four or so years since OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot and kicked off the A.I. boom, Nvidia’s market valuation has ballooned more than tenfold. Demand has surged for its chips, known as graphics processing units. They are key components for developing and running A.I., but there are growing concerns about costs associated with A.I. development.
Unlike the rest of the technology industry, Apple is not overhauling itself around A.I. Its fellow technology giants are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on making their own version of the technology and building data centers that house chips from Nvidia. But Apple is using A.I. models and cloud computing services from Google for its own products.
Apple has suggested it will continue to avoid the spendthrift ways of its peers, even as the company transitions from Tim Cook, its longtime chief executive, to John Ternus, most recently its head of hardware engineering. In April, during a call with analysts and investors, Mr. Ternus said he planned to maintain the financial discipline that defined Mr. Cook’s tenure at Apple.
The company’s prolonged absence from A.I. was not wholly by design. It first tried to weave the technology through its devices and upgrade its digital assistant, Siri, in 2024. But those efforts were plagued by delays and quality problems, culminating in the company’s postponing the release of the new technology until it could be improved.
In June, Apple reintroduced an improved version of Siri, which it said would arrive this year. At the time, the company argued that its approach to A.I. was different from that of its peers in Silicon Valley.
“Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing A.I. for the sake of A.I., without clear regard for the people — all of us — that it’s ultimately meant to serve,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, said in June.
