Nvidia was set to rejoin the $3 trillion club Tuesday for the first time since February.
The stock gained 5.4% Monday, putting its market capitalization nose hairs behind $3 trillion — the AI chipmaker’s value was $2.9997 trillion as of Monday’s close, to be exact, according to Bloomberg data.
That gain was part of a larger surge in the so-called “Magnificent Seven” Big Tech stocks after the Trump administration temporarily slashed tariffs on Chinese imports to 30% from as high as 145% for 90 days, signaling a deescalation in the mounting US-China trade war.
Nvidia shares jumped an additional 1.5% premarket Tuesday, putting the company on track to close above the $3 trillion mark for the first time since Feb. 28.
Nvidia, Apple (AAPL), and Microsoft (MSFT) have taken turns as the world’s most valuable company over the past year. But Nvidia has fallen behind, failing to notch the number one spot since January.
The AI chipmaker has also underperformed the S&P 500 (^GSPC) so far in 2025 for the first time in years as macroeconomic uncertainty due to Trump’s trade war and growing scrutiny of Big Tech’s AI investments put shares under pressure.
Trump’s trade policies have both helped and hurt Nvidia.
The administration has implemented an effective ban on sales of Nvidia’s chips for China, a version of its prior generation Hopper AI GPUs called H20 tailored to comply with US trade restrictions. JPMorgan (JPM) analyst Harlan Sur projected that, overall, Nvidia will lose as much as $16 billion in the current fiscal year from the H20 ban.
The ban comes just as competition ramps up from Chinese tech firm Huawei, which is reportedly poised to begin shipping chips competitive with Nvidia’s older Hopper chips.
At the same time, the Trump administration has said it’s scrapping a more sweeping Biden-era policy, the so-called AI Diffusion rule, that was set to limit exports of Nvidia AI chips to most countries beginning in May.
The consequent push-and-pull effect on Nvidia shares from the trade rule changes in April came after the AI chip stock suffered a massive blow to start 2025, when a cheap AI model from Chinese startup DeepSeek prompted questions in January over whether American tech firms really need to spend hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure (including Nvidia’s chips).
At the same time, AI stocks as a whole have come under greater scrutiny as investors closely watch Big Tech’s monetization of the technology relative to its mammoth investments.
For now, tech firms’ spending spree on AI infrastructure continues: Meta (META) and Microsoft reaffirmed their aggressive AI investment plans in their most recent quarterly earnings reports, sending Nvidia stock upward. Microsoft reiterated its $80 billion spending plan to build out AI data centers, while Meta raised its capital expenditure outlook for 2025 as high as $72 billion.
