Nvidia Loses Top Spot to Apple as Chip Selloff Hits Valuation

New York: Nvidia briefly lost its crown as the world's most valuable publicly traded company to Apple early Friday, amid the latest selloff in semiconductor shares and doubts that the AI boom can keep pace.

Shares of Nvidia were down as much as four percent as worries about the valuation of artificial intelligence equities dogged the market, giving the company a valuation of about $4.8 trillion, slightly below Apple's $4.9 trillion.

The company run by CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang later clawed back the losses, with Apple and Nvidia trading neck and neck for the top spot.

Nvidia has become the signature stock for the AI revolution triggered by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, with its powerful processors core to the technology.

Its graphics processing units, originally built for video gaming and now housed in purpose-built AI data centers, are the key component needed to train the large language models built by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Shares of the company -- which underwent a 10-for-1 stock split in June 2024 -- have surged from a split-adjusted $14.86 in January 2023 to approximately $205 in mid-July 2026, representing an increase of more than 1,200 percent.

It became the world's most valuable company in 2025.

In recent weeks, some doubts have cracked the AI bonanza narrative, with analysts wondering if the huge investments in Nvidia's chips and software can be recovered through the adoption of the new AI products being released to the public.

The questions have grown louder with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and rival Anthropic, two of the most valuable private companies in history, having filed to go public.

They would follow SpaceX, Elon Musk's space company that also includes his AI unit xAI, which priced its IPO at $135 in June, soared past $220 within days, but has since given back most of those gains to trade near its launch price.

The SpaceX roller coaster ride has increased murmurs of an AI bubble on Wall Street, with the big tech giants that are spending tens of billions of dollars largely on data centers and Nvidia products also seeing their share prices suffer in recent months.

The only exception is Apple, which does not build its own large language models, and after having been seen as a laggard in the AI race, is now rewarded for its caution and its solid iPhone sales.