Nvidia briefly topped a $4 trillion valuation on Wednesday, becoming the first publicly traded company to cross that threshold and cementing its lead in the global race to supply chips for artificial-intelligence systems. The stock rose as much as 2.8 % to an intraday record of $164.42, giving the Santa Clara-based chipmaker a market capitalisation larger than France’s GDP. The rally lifted Nvidia’s year-to-date gain to about 22 % and caps a 1,350 % surge since October 2022. Nvidia reached the $4 trillion mark little more than a year after it first topped $3 trillion and two years after passing $1 trillion, outpacing the growth of every other megacap company. Its ascent has pushed the firm’s weighting in the S&P 500 to roughly 7.5 %, ahead of Apple and just ahead of Microsoft, whose own market value hovers around $3.7 trillion. Investors have bet heavily that demand for Nvidia’s graphics-processing units will continue to accelerate as technology giants expand spending on generative-AI infrastructure. In the most recent quarter the company posted revenue of $44.1 billion and projected sales of about $45 billion for the current period, despite ongoing U.S. export controls and rising competition from AMD and custom in-house chips at cloud providers.