Despite Its Busted AI, Apple Just Stole Nvidia’s Crown as the Most Valuable Company

Apple briefly surpassed Nvidia as the world's most valuable company on Friday, with a $4.89 trillion market cap edging out Nvidia's $4.85 trillion, despite Apple's lagging AI efforts. Analysts attribute the shift to investor concerns over Nvidia's exposure to massive AI capital expenditures and limited returns, while Apple's cautious AI spending and strong iPhone sales offer stability. The milestone also follows a Chinese AI startup's model release that previously triggered a similar market cap change for Nvidia.

Apple, the AI laggard, just briefly became a more valuable company than Nvidia, the AI leader. On Friday, Apple’s $4.89 market valuation briefly and barely beat Nvidia’s $4.85, more than a year after the chipmaker was last https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/03/nvidia-microsoft-most-valuable-company.html dethroned from its leading position in the stock market. Apple has been trailing in the AI space and taking it slow while competitors make huge, reckless leaps. An AI catch-up effort has long been promised, but the AI-enhanced Siri only made its public debut https://gizmodo.com/the-long-delayed-new-siri-makes-its-public-debut-2000785101 last week, following delays that pushed the timeline off for more than a year. And everyone is waiting to see what the Cupertino giant has to offer at its big September product launch. Meanwhile, Nvidia has enjoyed becoming the poster child of success in the AI hype era. The company became the first to hit a $5 trillion valuation https://gizmodo.com/nvidia-becomes-the-first-company-to-hit-5-trillion-market-cap-2000678694 benchmark late last year, inking one multibillion-dollar deal after another to become the primary supplier of the AI buildout. But that position at the center of all this dealmaking may have caused some investors to grow wary of the company. In the last few months, soaring financial commitments from AI hyperscalers like Microsoft, despite limited returns from AI, have alarmed people, with some analysts even painting out doomsday scenarios of this investment turning the tech giants’ cash flow negative. If that happens, that would certainly hit Nvidia’s profits as well, considering it’s the primary hardware supplier for all of them, which is why some experts have begun to fear that Nvidia’s revenue growth might be peaking. That growing fear among investors is something company executives, including CEO Jensen Huang, have spent the last couple of months trying to ease https://gizmodo.com/nvidia-wants-to-decouple-its-reputation-from-meta-amazon-google-and-microsoft-2000761550 . Apple, on the other hand, may have been smart to keep its AI capex within a reasonable range, analysts argue, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-17/apple-tops-nvidia-as-world-s-largest-company-amid-tech-rotation giving the tech giant enough leeway to continue competing in AI without overshooting. “Apple is less exposed to capex intensity and better positioned to monetize AI via services, ecosystem lock-in, and hardware upgrades,” BRI Wealth Management head of investment Toni Meadows told Reuters https://www.reuters.com/business/apple-closes-nvidia-race-worlds-most-valuable-company-2026-07-17/ . On top of that, Apple’s iPhone sales https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8pdk3l4d2o have continued to be strong, even when global smartphone shipments have hit record lows https://gizmodo.com/the-memory-shortage-is-so-bad-that-smartphone-shipments-hit-a-record-low-2000784996 due to the memory chip shortage. Some major AI news out of China could have also partially inspired Friday’s stock move. On Thursday, Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot debuted its latest model, Kimi K3, https://gizmodo.com/china-just-dropped-another-bomb-on-americas-frontier-ai-companies-2000786670 a gigantic soon-to-be open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters. The announcement sent waves across the American AI industry, particularly for the model’s high performance across multiple benchmarks compared to the latest costlier offerings from the frontier American AI companies. The last time a cheaper Chinese model proved serious competition to more expensive frontier American counterparts was with DeepSeek’s R1 back in January 2025. Shortly after the model’s debut, Nvidia lost its most valuable company position to Microsoft, and didn’t regain it until June 2025. When it comes to running open models locally, the Mac mini has seen a lot of demand https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apple-mac-mini-supply-3e7a7509 as a go-to AI machine.