Happy Friday.
The stock markets in the US closed the week out with the world’s first four trillion dollar company: Nvidia (NVDA), listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Here’s Tripp Mickle reporting for the New York Times from San Francisco:
Nvidia spent three decades building a business worth $1 trillion. It spent two years turning itself into a $4 trillion company.
On Thursday, the world’s leading provider of computer chips for artificial intelligence became the first public company worth $4 trillion, after its stock ended the day trading just above $164 a share. It achieved the milestone before an array of better-known tech heavyweights, including Apple and Microsoft.
Nvidia’s rise is among the fastest in Wall Street history, and a testament to investors’ belief that artificial intelligence will deliver an economic transformation that rivals the Industrial Revolution’s.

Apple and Microsoft, the market’s two largest companies in recent years, have led the way toward the $3 trillion mark. But Nvidia’s rise is unprecedented. In two years, it went from being valued at $1 trillion to becoming the first company with a market capitalization of $4 trillion.
… Early this year, its shares fell 17 percent and it lost $600 billion in market value on a single day after the Chinese company DeepSeek claimed it could train a cutting-edge A.I. system with a tiny fraction of the Nvidia chips U.S. companies were using. Investors’ fears proved to be overblown, and Nvidia recovered. But the breakthrough showed the volatility that comes with being an A.I. bellwether.
[Graphic by Karl Russell and Blacki Migliozzi/ NYT]