Nvidia surpasses Apple to become the 2nd-most-valuable company in the world

• Nvidia is now the second-most-valuable company in the world.
• The ongoing AI boom has helped catapult Nvidia's market valuation to $3.014 trillion.

Nvidia surged 5% on Wednesday to become the second-most-valuable company in the world, surpassing Apple.

The stock closed at $1,224.40 per share, giving it a market valuation of $3.014 trillion.

The ongoing artificial-intelligence boom has catapulted Nvidia's market valuation to the $3 trillion club as mega-cap tech companies such as Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft rush to buy the company's supply-constrained AI-enabling GPU chips.

Nvidia's valuation was just above $950 billion a year ago and was about $400 billion in November 2022 when OpenAI first released ChatGPT to the public.

Apple stock, while trading near record highs, has stagnated over the past year as investors wait to see what the iPhone maker's AI strategy is.

Apple stock is up 2% year to date, compared with Nvidia's year-to-date gain of 146%.

Apple held a market valuation of $3.00 trillion Wednesday afternoon, or about $15 billion below Nvidia's current valuation.

With Apple surpassed, Nvidia is behind only Microsoft, which is the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of $3.15 trillion.

With the AI boom powering much of the stock market higher, it's no surprise that the company most responsible for powering the boom has turned into one of the world's most valuable companies.

And Beth Kindig, an I/O Fund tech analyst, said she believed the gains could continue for Nvidia, arguing in an interview with CNBC last month that the company could be worth $10 trillion by 2030.

Kindig compared Nvidia's CUDA platform to Apple's iOS, saying: "Similar to iOS is really what locked people into the iPhone because developers were developing applications for the iPhone. The same thing is happening with Nvidia, which is that the CUDA platform is what software engineers, AI engineers are learning in order to program GPUs, so that helps lock them in, and that combination, right now, I'm calling it an impenetrable moat."