Apple has regained its position as the world’s most valuable company after overtaking Nvidia, marking a significant shift in investor sentiment surrounding the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.

The iPhone maker now boasts a market capitalisation of approximately $4.88 trillion, edging past Nvidia’s $4.86 trillion after the AI chip giant’s shares fell by 3.5% on Friday, according to Reuters.

The development marks Apple’s first return to the top since April last year, ending nearly a year of Nvidia’s dominance, driven largely by soaring demand for AI chips and infrastructure.

Market analysts say Apple’s resurgence reflects growing confidence in its long-term AI strategy, despite earlier concerns that the company was lagging behind competitors in developing advanced AI models.

Toni Meadows, Head of Investment at BRI Wealth Management, said investors have reassessed Apple’s strengths, noting that the company is less dependent on the heavy capital expenditure required to build AI infrastructure.

“Apple was seen as a laggard in the AI race because it wasn’t spending to develop models, but now sentiment has changed,” Meadows said.

He added that Apple is better positioned to generate AI-driven revenue through its services ecosystem, hardware upgrades, and strong customer loyalty, rather than relying on speculative AI investments.

Analysts also believe Apple’s vast ecosystem of iPhone users gives it a significant advantage, with the enormous amount of personal data stored on devices presenting an opportunity to deliver more intelligent and personalised AI experiences.

However, they note that Apple must balance this opportunity with its long-standing commitment to user privacy, ensuring any AI improvements do not compromise customer data protection.

Apple’s return to the top comes as the company intensifies efforts to strengthen its position in the AI race.

Last month, the company unveiled a long-awaited overhaul of its Siri voice assistant, introducing new AI-powered capabilities aimed at narrowing the gap with major technology rivals and emerging AI startups.

The move signals Apple’s determination to integrate AI more deeply across its products while maintaining its traditionally cautious approach to new technologies.

The achievement also carries symbolic importance for outgoing Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, who is expected to hand over leadership to hardware chief John Ternus in September.

Apple’s renewed market leadership is likely to shape investor assessments of Cook’s legacy after more than a decade at the helm, during which the company expanded its ecosystem and maintained its position as one of the world’s most profitable technology firms.

Apple’s market value resurgence follows another major milestone earlier this year when the company reclaimed its position as the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer.

According to preliminary estimates by Counterpoint Research’s Market Monitor, Apple overtook Samsung in 2025 as global smartphone shipments grew by two per cent year-on-year.

Strong demand for premium iPhone models and robust sales across emerging markets helped the company record the fastest growth among the world’s five largest smartphone brands, reinforcing investor confidence in Apple’s long-term growth prospects.

With renewed momentum in both smartphones and artificial intelligence, Apple appears to have convinced investors that its ecosystem-driven approach to AI could prove just as valuable as the infrastructure-focused strategies that previously propelled Nvidia to the top.

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The decision marks a departure from standard industry practice, where AI developers typically share pre-release versions of major models with leading chipmakers to ensure optimal performance on widely used hardware.

Instead, DeepSeek granted early access to domestic suppliers, including Huawei Technologies, the sources said. The move gives Chinese chipmakers several weeks to optimise the software for their processors ahead of the model’s expected release.

Nvidia and AMD declined to comment, while DeepSeek and Huawei did not respond to requests for comment.

The reasons behind the decision were not immediately clear. However, industry analysts suggest the move could align with broader Chinese government efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. semiconductor technology.

The development comes amid heightened scrutiny over U.S. export controls. A senior Trump administration official recently told Reuters that DeepSeek’s latest AI model was trained using Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell chips in mainland China, a potential violation of U.S. export restrictions. U.S. policy currently bars shipments of certain advanced AI chips to China.

DeepSeek’s models have been downloaded more than 75 million times on the open-source platform Hugging Face since the company gained global attention in early 2025. Chinese open-source AI models have seen rapid adoption, surpassing downloads of models from other countries on the platform over the past year.

U.S. authorities previously allowed Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips, designed for AI inference, to resume shipments to China, though licenses for more advanced processors remain restricted. It is unclear whether DeepSeek has obtained approval to purchase those chips.

Analysts say the immediate commercial impact on Nvidia and AMD may be limited, as DeepSeek’s models primarily serve as benchmarks rather than enterprise deployment standards. However, the decision underscores growing technological and geopolitical tensions as Chinese AI firms prepare to release new models in the coming months.

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The official said the U.S. believes DeepSeek may have clustered the advanced chips in a data center located in Inner Mongolia and could attempt to remove technical indicators revealing their origin.

The Blackwell chips are produced by Nvidia and are currently barred from export to China under U.S. Commerce Department regulations.

The official declined to explain how the U.S. obtained the intelligence or how DeepSeek allegedly acquired the chips but emphasized that U.S. policy prohibits shipping Blackwell processors to China.

Nvidia declined to comment, while the U.S. Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not respond to requests for comment.

The Chinese embassy in Washington criticized what it described as the politicization of trade and technology issues, saying Beijing opposes the “overstretching” of national security concerns and expansive export controls.

The allegation could deepen divisions in Washington over how strictly to limit China’s access to advanced AI semiconductors. Some policymakers argue that restricting exports protects U.S. technological dominance and national security, while others warn that aggressive curbs could push Chinese firms to accelerate domestic chip development.

The controversy underscores the intensifying global competition over advanced AI hardware — widely regarded as a strategic asset in both commercial and military domains.

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The collaboration, first reported by Bloomberg, brings together the world’s largest record label and a leading AI technology company, marking one of the most significant alliances yet between the music industry and the AI sector.

Under the partnership, Universal will work with Nvidia’s Music Flamingo, an advanced audio-language model designed to interpret songs beyond traditional metadata such as genre or tempo. Instead, the companies said the technology will help listeners discover music through emotional context, narrative structure and cultural meaning.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, the companies said the new tools are intended to deepen fan engagement while improving discovery opportunities for emerging artists.

“This is an era where a music catalogue can be explored like an intelligent universe — conversational, contextual, and genuinely interactive,” said Richard Kerris, Nvidia’s general manager for media and entertainment.

As part of the deal, Universal and Nvidia plan to establish an incubator that will allow artists to help design and test AI-powered creative tools. The initiative is aimed at avoiding what the companies described as low-quality, generic outputs that have characterised some early AI-generated music experiments.

The partnership reflects a shift in how major record labels approach artificial intelligence. Initially viewed as a threat to intellectual property, AI has increasingly become an area of collaboration rather than confrontation.

In 2024, Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group sued AI music startups Suno and Udio over alleged copyright infringement. Since then, the industry has pivoted toward negotiated settlements and partnerships. Universal and Warner have reached agreements with Udio to explore AI-driven music creation platforms, while Warner has also partnered with Suno.

All three major labels have additionally licensed portions of their catalogues to Klay, a startup developing an AI-powered streaming service that allows users to remix and recreate songs.

The Universal-Nvidia partnership signals a broader recalibration, as record labels seek to influence how AI tools are developed and deployed, rather than risk being sidelined by them.

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The new platform is designed to help self-driving systems reason through complex and rare real-world situations, such as traffic light failures or unpredictable road behaviour, rather than relying solely on prior training data.

“The ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here – when machines begin to understand, reason, and act in the real world,” Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions.”

At the centre of the release is Alpamayo 1, a 10-billion-parameter vision-language-action (VLA) model that uses chain-of-thought reasoning to enable autonomous vehicles to make step-by-step decisions similar to human drivers. The model is designed to handle edge cases without requiring direct prior experience.

“It breaks down problems into steps, reasons through every possibility and then selects the safest path,” said Ali Kani, Nvidia’s vice president of automotive, during a press briefing.

According to Huang, Alpamayo goes beyond simply translating sensor data into vehicle controls. “It reasons about what action it’s about to take, explains why it chose that action, and then executes the trajectory,” he said during his keynote address.

Nvidia has made Alpamayo 1’s core code publicly available on Hugging Face, allowing developers to customise the model for different vehicle platforms. The company said the model can be fine-tuned into smaller and faster versions, used to train simpler driving systems, or adapted for tasks such as automatic video labelling and decision-quality evaluation.

Developers can also use Cosmos, Nvidia’s generative world-model platform, to create synthetic driving data and combine it with real-world datasets for training and testing Alpamayo-based applications.

As part of the launch, Nvidia is releasing an open dataset comprising more than 1,700 hours of driving data gathered across multiple regions and conditions, including rare and complex traffic scenarios. The company is also introducing AlpaSim, an open-source simulation framework available on GitHub, designed to recreate real-world driving environments for large-scale testing and validation of autonomous systems.

Nvidia said the Alpamayo ecosystem is intended to lower barriers to developing safer and more transparent autonomous driving technologies as competition in the self-driving and robotics sectors intensifies.

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The losses — spanning Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Broadcom, Oracle, TSMC, AMD, Palantir, Apple and ASML — rattled markets globally, given the companies’ central role in the AI hardware and software supply chain. The sell-off erased an amount nearly equivalent to the entire Spanish stock market and almost half the market capitalisation of Canada.

Nvidia saw the steepest decline, shedding roughly $459 billion, followed by Microsoft ($333 billion) and Meta ($321 billion). Broadcom lost an estimated $173 billion, while Oracle, TSMC, AMD, Palantir, Apple and ASML recorded declines ranging from $21 billion to $102 billion.

The downturn came amid a broader tech-sector slump as investors reassessed whether the nearly two-year surge in AI-linked valuations had overshot fundamentals. Analysts pointed to a series of catalysts behind the sudden reversal. Alphabet’s reported push to supply its home-grown TPUs directly to major customers, including Meta, intensified concerns about rising competition in the AI chip market. Washington’s decision to further tighten export controls on advanced processors bound for China added additional pressure on chipmakers and manufacturing partners.

The sell-off was further fuelled by profit-taking after significant gains, as well as renewed questions about whether massive AI-related capital expenditure will translate into near-term earnings. Some AI software firms, including Palantir, had recently signalled slower-than-expected contract growth, adding to investor unease.

Despite the declines, all ten companies remain among the world’s most valuable corporations, reflecting the continued strategic importance of AI computing infrastructure. The episode underscored, however, how concentrated global equity markets have become; with mega-cap AI stocks now representing an outsized share of major indices, volatility in a handful of companies can move markets worldwide.

Within weeks of the sell-off, Nvidia’s stronger-than-expected quarterly results helped stabilise sentiment, though analysts say the correction served as an early reminder of the risks that accompany rapid technological transitions and elevated valuations in the AI sector.

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Nvidia is on track to add about $243 billion to its market cap, which is more than the entire valuation of companies such as PepsiCo and Goldman Sachs, if gains hold, with shares up 5% at $196.53 in premarket trading, Reuters reported on Thursday.

The results tempered some concerns over a potential AI bubble, although questions lingered around the sustainability of the massive spending boom, not paying off as anticipated.

Bullish spirit lifted many tech stocks around the world, with shares of U.S. chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel rising about 5% and 2% respectively, while Arm Holdings, Micron Technology, and Broadcom gained between 1% and 3%.

The European tech index climbed 1.2%, with ASML gaining 2.1%.

Across Asia, Taiwan’s TSMC jumped 4.3%, SK Hynix gained over 1.6% and Japan’s Nikkei reclaimed the 50,000 mark as chip suppliers and AI-linked stocks surged.

Nvidia’s forward price-to-earnings ratio stands at 28.44, below AMD’s 35.70 and far lower than Intel’s 62.38.

The results marked Nvidia’s first acceleration in seven quarters, powered by surging data-center sales. Revenue guidance topped estimates, and margins are expected to hold in the mid-70% range through fiscal year 2027.

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The legislation, known as the GAIN AI Act — short for Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence — is included in the National Defense Authorization Act. It would require chipmakers to prioritize domestic orders before selling to foreign customers.

Microsoft has publicly endorsed the bill, while Amazon’s cloud division has privately expressed support to Senate staffers. Anthropic is also backing the legislation. Meta and Google have not taken a position, and President Donald Trump has not endorsed the proposal.

The White House has reportedly told lawmakers that the Commerce Department already regulates AI chip exports, limiting the practical impact of the bill.

Nvidia has warned that the proposal could weaken global competition by restricting access to high-performance chips.

The legislation reflects ongoing U.S. efforts to prevent China from acquiring advanced AI hardware seen as critical to military and strategic capabilities.

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In an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired Sunday, Trump said, “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States. We don’t give the Blackwell chip to other people.”

The statement signals possible tighter export restrictions on high-end U.S. semiconductors than previously indicated by his administration. It could also upend existing plans for Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which the company recently agreed to supply to major South Korean firms including Samsung Electronics.

Trump clarified that while U.S. allies may access certain AI technologies, China will not be permitted to buy the most sophisticated chips, though scaled-down versions might still be allowed.

The remarks drew praise from China hawks in Congress, with Rep. John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, warning that any relaxation would be “akin to giving Iran weapons-grade uranium.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company has not sought export licenses for China, citing Beijing’s restrictive stance. “They’ve made it very clear they don’t want Nvidia to be there right now,” Huang said last week.

The announcement adds fresh uncertainty to the global AI supply chain, as Washington seeks to maintain its technological lead while preventing Beijing’s access to cutting-edge semiconductors.

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During this week’s APEC Summit 2025, Nvidia and the South Korean government unveiled an expanded partnership aimed at strengthening the country’s artificial intelligence infrastructure and advancing “physical AI” capabilities. The deal comes shortly after the United States signed new technology agreements with Japan and South Korea to deepen cooperation on emerging technologies such as AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, and 6G.

Under the agreement, South Korea will acquire more than 260,000 of Nvidia’s latest GPUs to meet rising AI demand. About 50,000 of these will support public projects, including domestic AI foundation models and a national AI data center. The remaining 200,000 GPUs will be distributed among major corporations such as Samsung, SK, Hyundai, and Naver to drive AI-based manufacturing and industry-specific model development.

Samsung Electronics announced plans to establish an AI Megafactory in partnership with Nvidia. The facility will integrate AI into every stage of semiconductor, mobile, and robotics production using more than 50,000 Nvidia GPUs and the company’s Omniverse platform. The two companies, which have collaborated for over 25 years, are also working together on HBM4 — Nvidia’s next-generation high-bandwidth memory designed for advanced AI systems.

Nvidia will additionally partner with Samsung, SK Telecom, KT, LG Uplus, and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) to co-develop AI-RAN, a network technology that merges mobile base stations with AI to boost performance and reduce power consumption.

Hyundai Motor Group and Nvidia will establish AI research centers and use 50,000 Blackwell GPUs to enhance autonomous mobility, robotics, and smart manufacturing systems. Huang said the partnership will help build “intelligent cars and factories that will shape the future of the multitrillion-dollar mobility industry.”

SK Group, the parent company of SK Hynix, will collaborate with Nvidia to build Asia’s first enterprise-led AI manufacturing cloud using simulation and digital twin technologies. Naver Cloud, meanwhile, plans to work with Nvidia on a next-generation “Physical AI” platform that connects industrial operations to digital systems, targeting applications in semiconductors, energy, shipbuilding, and biotechnology.

Nvidia’s latest collaborations reinforce the growing convergence of AI and hardware across global industries. Earlier this week, the company announced similar partnerships with Eli Lilly, Palantir, Uber, Joby Aviation, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Nvidia’s stock has surged following the announcements, making it the first publicly traded firm to surpass a $5 trillion market capitalization.

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