Apple Overtakes Nvidia as World Most Valuable Company at Near 5 Trillion

Apple surpassed Nvidia in market capitalization on July 17, 2026, reclaiming the title of the world's most valuable publicly traded company. Apple's market value is approaching the $5 trillion mark, driven by a strong advance in its shares and a pullback across semiconductor stocks after an extended AI-driven rally.

The shift reflects a change in investor thinking. For much of the past two years, Nvidia dominated as the primary beneficiary of the AI boom, with its chips powering data centers and AI training workloads worldwide. Apple's return to the top suggests investors now see control of consumer devices as equally valuable to control of the chips that support AI.

The same day, China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a new open-weight model that immediately ranked among the strongest AI systems available for coding and agent-based tasks. The Alibaba-backed startup said Kimi K3 was built for long-horizon workflows. The model reached the top position on Arena.ai's Frontend Code Arena with a 76 percent pairwise win rate, finishing ahead of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.

Google fell further behind on its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model, which has been delayed by several months after internal testing revealed shortfalls in coding performance and complex reasoning tasks. Alphabet shares fell more than 4 percent after reports of the delay surfaced.

Apple also launched a trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI and sent legal warnings to approximately 40 former employees who moved to the AI firm. The company is seeking to preserve documents and meet with former staff amid an escalating dispute over hardware trade secrets.

Meta hired Dave Brown, one of Amazon Web Services' most senior computing executives, as it accelerates data center expansion and considers a larger role in cloud infrastructure.