Apple is poised to become the first company to break the $4 trillion mark — powered by investors cheering the tech giant’s progress on long-awaited AI improvements to revive sluggish iPhone sales.
The company has pulled ahead of Nvidia and Microsoft in the race to reach the milestone, thanks to a roughly 16% rise in shares since early November that has added about $500 billion to its market capitalization.
Apple stock was trading at about $255 a share shortly after the opening bell on Monday, putting its market capitalization at $3.86 trillion. Shares are up nearly 40% since January 1.
The recent rally in Apple shares reflects “investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and an expectation that it will result in an overcycle of iPhone upgrades,” said Tom Forte, an analyst at Maxim Group, who has a “hold” rating. .
Nvidia, whose stock price has risen 184% since the start of the calendar year, was worth $3.35 trillion as of Monday morning.
But shares have cooled in recent weeks as investors grew nervous about the company’s move to a new AI chip, Blackwell, which has been touted as the firm’s most powerful graphics processing unit (GPU).
Microsoft, one of the biggest backers of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, is third with a market cap of $3.22 trillion.
Earlier this month, Apple launched iOS 18.2, a major software update for its iPhone lineup that includes improvements and features that enhance its Apple Intelligence functions, including Visual Intelligence, which summarizes and translates text.
Another AI feature, Image Playground, generates original images from descriptions.
The latest AI improvements are available exclusively to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 users.
The Cupertino, California-based company is expected to generate significant sales of its iPhone during the Christmas shopping season.
“We believe Apple will have a strong holiday season ahead as iPhone 16 upgrades to its installed base are trending well into Christmas, based on our recent supply chain checks in Asia,” wrote Daniel Ives, senior analyst at Wedbush in his latest report over the weekend.
Ives predicts that Apple stock will eclipse the $300 per share plateau within the next 12 months and that the company’s market capitalization will exceed $4 trillion “by early 2025.”
“We believe the success of iPhone 16 with a strong holiday season ahead over the next week will be the basis for a resurgence of growth in Cupertino over the next 12 to 18 months starting in this December quarter,” he wrote he.
Apple shrugged off a recent decline in iPhone sales during its summer quarter, an early sign that its latest efforts to revive demand for its marquee product with an infusion of artificial intelligence are paying off.
iPhone sales totaled $46.22 billion for the July-September period, a 6% increase from the same time last year, according to Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter report released in late October.
This improvement reversed two consecutive year-over-year declines in quarterly iPhone sales.
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