Apple is the world's most valuable company again, and it got the crown back in the most fitting way possible: on the day its $2,000 foldable actually hit shelves.
Shares climbed 0.4% to a record $349.55 in early Friday trading, according to TipRanks, lifting Apple's market cap to roughly $5.10 trillion. At its intraday high above $351, 9to5Mac puts the figure closer to $5.12 trillion. Either way, it edges past Nvidia's roughly $5.06 trillion and makes Apple only the second company ever to sit above the $5 trillion mark — a milestone it first crossed just last week.
But here's the interesting part: this isn't really a victory lap for the iPhone Duo. It's a verdict on the AI trade.
Nvidia's stock has fallen about 6% over the past month while Apple's is up 3%, per TipRanks. Investors are growing visibly nervous about the scale of AI infrastructure spending — on Thursday, the Nasdaq fell nearly 700 points, or 2.6%, as money rotated out of tech and into defensive plays like blue chips and government bonds. Nvidia sits at the center of that anxiety; every data center pledge is a question about returns. Apple, meanwhile, is notably not spending heavily on AI data centers and microchips — and the market is currently treating that restraint as a virtue.
The irony is thick: Nvidia's AI boom powered the longest bull run in chip history, and now the same spending cycle is weighing it down. Apple wins the crown precisely by staying out of the arms race.
Wall Street isn't unanimous on what comes next. Apple is up 28% year to date, outperforming its Magnificent Seven peers, but Seeking Alpha notes the rally has pushed its valuation to roughly 36 times earnings — a five-year high. Earlier this week, Loop Capital downgraded the stock to Hold and cut its price target to $330, citing reduced iPhone shipment estimates and potential pressure on gross margins.
So the crown is back in Cupertino for now, but it comes with a warning label: the market just paid a premium for a company that sells phones instead of GPUs. Whether the iPhone Duo justifies a $5 trillion valuation is the next question — and with some configurations already slipping into 2027 shipping windows, demand is doing its part of the argument.
— via 9to5Mac