A day after finishing with a valuation above Amazon.com Inc., Nvidia Corp. boxed out Alphabet Inc. as well.
The chip maker’s stock NVDA, +2.46% rose 2.5% in Wednesday trading, giving the company a market value of $ 1.825 trillion. Alphabet’s stock GOOG, +0.53% GOOGL, +0.55% was only up 0.6%, and the company ended the day with a $ 1.821 trillion valuation.
Wednesday’s action made Nvidia the third-largest U.S. company by market capitalization, behind Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +0.97% ($ 3.04 trillion) and Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.48% ($ 2.84 trillion).
When Nvidia closed with a higher valuation than Amazon AMZN, +1.39% in Tuesday’s session, it achieved that milestone for the first time since April 18, 2002, according to Dow Jones Market Data. But Nvidia’s move ahead of Alphabet on Wednesday marked the first time on record that the hardware maker had the valuation edge over Google’s parent company.
See also: Jeff Bezos unloads another $ 2 billion of Amazon stock. He’s sold $ 4 billion this month.
Nvidia was the seventh-largest company by market cap both a year and two years ago, and it was the 12th largest three years ago. Four years back, Nvidia sat outside the top 20.
Its dramatic climb up the ranks of the largest U.S. businesses comes as the company is seeing blockbuster demand for its graphics-processing units that are used to power the artificial-intelligence boom. The stock is up 222% over a 12-month span.
Shares of Nvidia experienced only a fractional decline Tuesday on a tough day for the broad market, which illustrated to Mizuho desk-based analyst Jordan Klein that the theme of AI capital expenditures and buildouts is “alive and well” and contributing to FOMO — fear of missing out — in “parts of the market.”
That dynamic makes Nvidia’s Feb. 21 earnings report all the more intriguing.