NEW YORK: Nvidia notched a market capitalization of $4 trillion on Wednesday, making it the first public company in the world to reach the milestone and solidifying its position as one of Wall Street’s most-favored stocks.

Shares of the leading chip designer rose as much as 2.5% to an all-time high of $164, benefiting from the ongoing surge in demand for artificial intelligence technologies.

Nvidia’s soaring market value underscores Wall Street’s confidence in the rapid growth of AI, with the company’s high-performance chips forming the backbone of this technological advance.

The stock’s recent rally follows a sluggish start to the year, when the emergence of a Chinese discount artificial intelligence model developed by DeepSeek shook confidence in stocks linked to the sector.

“It started out as being a gaming chipmaker and then a crypto mining chipmaker and now as a chipmaker for artificial intelligence computing power,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B Riley Wealth.

“It is continuing to move forward and be a clear early winner of artificial intelligence.”

Nvidia achieved a $1 trillion market value for the first time in June 2023 and tripled it in about a year, faster than Apple and Microsoft, the only other US firms with a market value of more than $3 trillion.

Microsoft is the second biggest US company, with a market capitalization of $3.75 trillion.—Reuters