Nvidia and Apple trade places as top-valued company during chip selloff

Nvidia briefly lost its position as the world's most valuable publicly traded company to Apple early Friday during a selloff in semiconductor shares and amid doubts about whether the artificial intelligence boom can keep its pace.

Nvidia shares fell as much as four percent, giving the company a value of about $4.8 trillion. That put it slightly below Apple's $4.9 trillion valuation. Nvidia later recovered its losses, and the two companies traded close to each other for the top spot.

Nvidia has become a leading stock linked to the AI industry since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Its processors are central to AI data centers and are used to train large language models built by companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

The company, led by chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang, carried out a 10-for-1 stock split in June 2024. Its shares rose from a split-adjusted $14.86 in January 2023 to about $205 in mid-July 2026, an increase of more than 1,200 percent. It became the world's most valuable company in 2025.

Recent market concerns have focused on whether the heavy spending on Nvidia chips and software can be recovered through adoption of new AI products. The source said those questions have grown as OpenAI and Anthropic, two highly valued private companies, have filed to go public.

They would follow SpaceX, Elon Musk's space company that also includes his AI unit xAI. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 in June, rose above $220 within days, then gave back most of those gains and traded near its launch price.

The source said that performance has increased talk on Wall Street of a possible AI bubble. Large technology companies spending tens of billions of dollars, mainly on data centers and Nvidia products, have also seen their share prices weaken in recent months.

Apple has been an exception. The source said Apple does not build its own large language models and had been seen as behind in the AI race, but investors have rewarded it for caution and solid iPhone sales.