Apple's market value surpassed Nvidia in one fell swoop, and it once again topped the list of the world's most valuable companies after more than a year. Investors are now optimistic that the iPhone maker can achieve a comeback in the artificial intelligence field, and at the same time, it does not need to spend huge and risky capital expenditures on data centers like other large technology giants.
Nvidia shares fell nearly 4% in early trading in New York on Friday. Previously, Chinese artificial intelligence company Dark Side of the Moon released a new Kimi K3 large model, which shook the market's confidence in Silicon Valley's trillion-level AI infrastructure investment, and the technology sector suffered a collective sell-off.
On the other hand, Apple's stock price opened flat, and its market value is only one step away from the $5 trillion mark. Nvidia was the first to surpass the $5 trillion mark in October last year, and Apple may become the second company in history to reach this ultra-high market value.
Nvidia's market capitalization slipped to $4.86 trillion in early trading Friday.
Many investors regard Apple as a safe haven in the AI market. Hyperscale cloud vendors such as Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have spent hundreds of billions of dollars purchasing chips and building data centers. However, Apple has not followed up on similar huge investments.
Apple shares have risen about 20% since the end of June. The market hopes that the company can resolve the problem of skyrocketing memory chip prices and regain lost ground in the field of artificial intelligence. Last month, Apple launched a new version of its Siri voice assistant that has been polished for a long time, and the overall market review was positive.
Last month, Apple made an unprecedented increase in the prices of iPads and Macs, by as much as 20%. The company said there was an "extreme surge in demand for memory and storage chips."
The Silicon Valley company said: "We have never seen such a rapid and substantial increase in component prices." As soon as the news came out, Apple's stock price suffered its largest single-day decline since the Trump administration launched the "Liberation Day" policy last year.
However, the media later revealed that Apple was communicating with the Trump administration, which is expected to alleviate the pressure on component price increases, and Apple's stock price rebounded quickly.
Since then, Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI has also been pursued by Wall Street funds. OpenAI plans to launch a new AI hardware device to compete with the iPhone, and Apple's lawsuit accuses its former employees of stealing trade secrets when they jumped to the ChatGPT developer.
In addition, Chinese regulations signaled that Apple’s self-developed AI system is expected to soon land in China, the world’s largest smartphone market by shipment volume. This news also boosted Apple’s stock price.
HSBC is one of the few Wall Street brokerages that has not previously given Apple a "buy" rating, and analysts at the bank upgraded Apple's rating on Friday. Analysts said that relying on Apple’s intelligent system, which is about to be fully upgraded, Apple has 2.5 billion existing devices and has sufficient advantages to tap AI dividends.
HSBC added that the market expects Apple to launch its first foldable screen iPhone this year. It happens to have the most innovative product pipeline in recent years, and AI empowerment comes at the right time.
HSBC also pointed out that Apple plans to spend only 2.5% of its expected revenue in 2026 on capital expenditures such as AI data centers, while the top hyperscale cloud vendors account for as much as 39% of this expenditure.