Nvidia Becomes First $5T Company as AI Demand Surges (www.macrumors.com)

Nvidia became the first public company to hit a $5 trillion market capitalization, reaching the milestone just 3.5 months after passing $4 trillion as its shares jumped about 14.5% over the past week. The rally is driven by surging demand for Nvidia GPUs, which are central to training and running large language models and other AI workloads. The stock move was also fueled by speculation that export restrictions could ease—U.S. rules currently block Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell AI chips from being sold to China, and China has restricted some imports for national security reasons; recent comments about a planned U.S.–China discussion have raised hopes of a thaw. For the AI/ML community, Nvidia’s milestone underscores how critical high-performance accelerators are to modern AI development and how market concentration in GPU suppliers shapes the ecosystem. Technical implications include ongoing supply constraints and geopolitical controls that could bifurcate access to top-tier training hardware, affecting where and how quickly cutting-edge models are developed. While rivals like Apple are building internal AI servers (and have reportedly invested in Nvidia server tech), Apple’s systems are geared for internal use and aren’t expected to displace Nvidia’s dominant role in cloud and datacenter AI infrastructure.