King of the (Stock) World: After ceding its Wall Street crown to Nvidia, Apple has reclaimed the title of the world's most valuable public company, and the shift says as much about the mood on Wall Street as it does about Apple itself. Investors are growing wary of the AI infrastructure race that's driven tech valuations for years, and they're rewarding the one Big Tech giant that largely sat it out.
The timing adds extra stakes, too. Tim Cook is preparing to step down soon, and the incoming CEO is expected to preserve the same approach to market and financial management that defined Cook's tenure, the very discipline investors now appear to be betting on.
Apple's stock rose 1% this week to push its market cap to roughly $4.9 trillion, while Nvidia's shares fell 5%, dropping the chipmaker to about $4.8 trillion. Chip stocks have been especially volatile lately, which is one reason a "traditional" IT company like Apple looks better positioned to ride out the turbulence.
Nvidia became the first company in the world to cross a $5 trillion market cap in 2025, fueled by surging interest in AI tools and infrastructure that heavily depend on its hardware and software. The company's valuation has grown more than tenfold as Nvidia supplied the GPUs needed to train and run today's most complex AI models. Other Big Tech players followed suit, pouring billions into ever-larger AI data center buildouts, most of them running on Nvidia's GPUs.
Source: CompaniesMarketCap
Apple has approached the "AI revolution" a little differently. The company that once adapted DARPA's CALO project to build Siri spent years developing its own custom large language models, but after apparently falling behind other AI pioneers, it opted to lean on Google's services and AI models for the next generation of Siri AI.
In somewhat of a turn of events, analyst Daniel Newman says investors are turning back to Apple because they see it as a safe harbor from the broader AI hangover.
As AI-focused stocks look increasingly volatile, Newman noted that owning Apple still feels "almost like owning an index."
Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to step down soon, handing the reins to senior VP of hardware engineering John Ternus. Cook led Apple for 15 years, and Ternus is reportedly set to carry on his former boss's approach to major financial decisions, including AI infrastructure spending.
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior VP of software engineering who oversees development of the company's operating systems, echoed that sentiment in June. The exec said AI is meant to serve people, not the other way around.