Apple has reclaimed its status as the world's most valuable publicly traded company, surpassing Nvidia in market capitalization. Investors have begun reassessing the prospects of artificial intelligence and potential beneficiaries of this market. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
According to Reuters, Apple's market capitalization reached $4.88 trillion, while Nvidia's value fell to $4.86 trillion after its shares dropped 3.5%.
Apple returned to the top spot among the world's largest companies for the first time since April last year. Prior to that, Nvidia had led for nearly a year, boosted by the rapid development of generative AI technologies.
As noted by Tony Meadows, head of the investment department at BRI Wealth Management, Apple was previously considered a laggard in the AI race because the company did not invest in building its own large language models. However, investor sentiment has now changed.
According to her, Apple is less dependent on massive capital expenditures and has broader opportunities to monetize artificial intelligence thanks to its own device ecosystem, services, and hardware upgrades.
Apple's return to the top comes amid preparations for a leadership change. In September, CEO Tim Cook is expected to hand over the post to hardware division veteran John Ternus.
Last month, Apple unveiled a long-awaited update to its voice assistant Siri. The company hopes the new features will help close the gap with other tech giants and startups in the field of artificial intelligence.
Some analysts consider Apple's main advantage to be the vast array of personal data from iPhone users, which could potentially make Siri significantly more useful. However, the company still needs to find a way to use this data without violating its own privacy principles.
Despite losing the lead, Nvidia remains one of the main beneficiaries of the global AI boom. The company's graphics processors power a significant portion of modern AI systems, so analysts do not rule out that the chipmaker could regain the top spot by capitalization.
In October last year, Nvidia became the first company in the world to exceed $5 trillion in market capitalization, cementing its leadership among global tech giants. Now the top spot has shifted back to Apple, but analysts believe the balance of power could change again as the AI market evolves.