NVIDIA Hits $5 Trillion Valuation As CEO Pops AI Bubble Concerns

NVIDIA can add to its long list of accomplishments becoming the first publicly traded company to reach and surpass a $5 trillion market cap as it rides the AI chip boom to new heights. Equally impressive, the sky high valuation comes just a few months after NVIDIA breached the $4 trillion mark, surpassing Apple's previous record of $3.915 trillion, which it had set at the beginning of 2024.

It's been a remarkable journey for NVIDIA and its co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who has navigated the firm through multiple market trends en route to the record valuation. Consider that just a few years ago, NVIDIA's gaming business was its bread and butter. Even then, Huang demonstrated an ability to remain flexible by shifting the company's focus to where the money trail was leading. For a time, that path lead to the cryptocurrency market.

The crypto market eventually bottomed out as specialized ASIC hardware overtook GPUs for mining certain currencies, including Bitcoin, the biggest crypto of them all. But then NVIDIA leaned more heavily into its RTX technologies, including DLSS upscaling, to help spur increased demand in the gaming sector.

Fast forward to now and NVIDIA's biggest business is the data center, and it's not even close. In its most recent earnings report (second quarter of fiscal 2026), NVIDIA revealed that its data center products and services generated over $41 billion in revenue for the quarter, compared to $4.3 billion for its gaming division.

That's a massive gap and it's never been wider. Just one year prior, the data center raked in $26.3 billion versus $2.9 billion for gaming. And in the third quarter of 2024, data center revenue settled in at $14.5 billion, compared to around the same $2.9 billion figure for gaming.

So now here we are, staring at a chip juggernaut with a market cap that's never been seen before from a publicly traded firm. The obvious question is what happens when the AI bubble pops? Will Huang and company demonstrate the same ability to pivot as it did when the crypto mining craze subsided? Well, as far as Huang is concerned, there is no bubble.

"I don't believe we're in an AI bubble. All of these different AI models we're using -- we're using plenty of services and paying happily to do it," Huang commented during a Bloomberg Television interview.

Maybe you agree with him, maybe you don't. Either way, NVIDIA finds itself on a sharp upward trajectory for the time being. NVIDIA reckons it will ship 20 million Blackwell chips, whereas it shipped 4 million Hopper chips during its entire run. NVIDIA's also making major moves in the autonomous auto industry, such as partnering with Uber to roll out 100,000 robotaxis. In other words, NVIDIA could very well leave its $5 trillion market cap in the dust by the time Blackwell is in the rear view mirror.