A man wearing a mask walks past a Nvidia logo in Taipei, Taiwan.
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Nvidia hit a $1 trillion market cap at the open Tuesday, joining a small club of mostly technology companies. Nvidia’s shares have to hold above $404.86 to maintain that distinction throughout the day.
The stock rose nearly 6% in morning trading.
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The chipmaker’s shares rocketed last week after it posted quarterly earnings with top- and bottom-line numbers that significantly beat consensus estimates. Nvidia’s gain buoyed other chipmakers, with the notable exception of Intel, and was also fueled in part by estimates that were more optimistic than expected.
Significantly, Nvidia forecast $11 billion in sales for the second quarter of fiscal 2024 alone. The expected sales were 50% higher than consensus estimates of $7.15 billion.
It’s been a banner year for chipmakers, parts of the tech industry and the Nasdaq, driven in part by the artificial intelligence frenzy and the possibility of slowing Federal Reserve rate hikes. Alongside Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft were also buoyed in last week’s trading.
Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are critical to generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. The company has historically been a leader in the so-called discrete or stand-alone GPU field, but until recently, many consumers thought of GPUs as primarily used for intensive gaming.
The advent of crypto mining and AI has upended that belief, and GPU manufacturers and suppliers, including Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, have seen share prices rise significantly over the last few months.
By contrast, Intel, which struggled with inventory issues and development challenges, has been historically focused on the chip market for central processing units, or CPUs. The company hasn’t shared, comparatively, in the wave of investor interest.
Trillion-dollar market cap club
Symbol
Name
Market Value
YTD %
2023 Est. Revenue (Billions)
AAPL
Apple Inc.
$2.759 Trillion
36.4
384,748.7
MSFT
Microsoft Corporation
$2.475 Trillion
38.9
211,434.1
GOOGL
Alphabet Inc. Class A
$1.587 Trillion
40.83
299,810.2
AMZN
Amazon.com, Inc.
$1.232 Trillion
46.05
559,661.3
NVDA
NVIDIA Corporation
$1.00 Trillion
177.23
30,426.5
Source: FactSet
Nvidia’s Tuesday morning market cap places it alongside a handful of other companies, including Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, that have a $1 trillion or more valuation. Nvidia shares were already up 166.5% year to date before Tuesday’s open.
— CNBC’s Kif Leswing, John Melloy and Gina Francolla contributed to this report.
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that Nvidia forecast $11 billion in sales for the second quarter of fiscal 2024.
Alibaba‘s Hong Kong-listed shares surged on Wednesday to reach their highest point since 2021 after the company said it will invest more in artificial intelligence and rolled out new AI products and updates.
Shares of the company jumped over 6%, while its total gains year to date rose above 107%.
The tech giant plans to increase spending on AI models and infrastructure development, on top of the 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over three years it announced in February, Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said Wednesday at Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship technology conference.
“We are vigorously advancing a three-year, 380 billion [yuan] AI infrastructure initiative with plans to sustain and further increase our investment according to our strategic vision in anticipation of the [artificial superintelligence] era,” Wu said.
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Alibaba shares surge after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending
So-called ‘artificial superintelligence’ refers to AI that would hypothetically surpass the power and intelligence of the human brain, with the hypothetical benchmark becoming a growing focus of major AI companies.
Alibaba also officially unveiled the latest version of its Qwen large language models — the Qwen3-Max — on Wednesday, along with a series of other updates to its suite of AI product offerings.
Wu highlighted that Alibaba Cloud is strategically positioned as a “full-stack AI service provider,” delivering the computing power required for training and deploying large AI models on the cloud through its own data centers.
“The cumulative investment in global AI in the next five years will exceed $4 trillion, and this is the largest investment in computing power and research and development in history,” he added.
Venezuelan Bolivar and U.S. Dollar banknotes and representations of cryptocurrency Tether are seen in this illustration taken Sept. 8, 2025.
Dado Ruvic | Array
Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin, is planning to raise as much as $20 billion in a deal that could put the crypto company’s value on par with OpenAI, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
The crypto company is looking to raise between $15 billion and $20 billion in exchange for a roughly 3% stake through a private placement, the report said, citing two individuals familiar with the matter. The transaction would involve new equity rather than existing investors selling their stakes, the people told the news service.
The report said that one person close to the matter warned that the talks are in an early stage, which means that the eventual details, including the size of the offering, could change.
However, the deal could ultimately value Tether at around $500 billion, according to the report. That would mean the crypto giant’s valuation would rival some of the world’s biggest private companies, including SpaceX and OpenAI. OpenAI’s fundraising round earlier this year valued the tech company at $300 billion.
Tether, which was once accused of being a criminal’s “go-to cryptocurrency,” has been furthering its plans to return to the U.S. in recent months, given President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto stance. The company earlier this month named a CEO for its U.S. business and launched a new token for businesses and institutions in the U.S. called USAT, which will be regulated in the U.S. under the GENIUS Act.
Stablecoin USD Tether (USDT) is pegged to the U.S. dollar with a market cap that recently surpassed $172 billion. In second place is Tether rival Circle’s USDC stablecoin, which is worth about $74 billion.
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
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Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.
The stock rose in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected
Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.
The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.
Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.
“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.
Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.
Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.
However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.