Apple touched a $5 trillion US market cap for the first time on Tuesday, becoming only the second company in history to reach that mark after Nvidia.
Investors have been pulling money out of semiconductor and AI stocks in recent weeks and parking it somewhere steadier, and Apple has been the main beneficiary. In other words, there’s a fire sale right now on AI tech stocks.
Shares climbed as much as 1.8 per cent to an intraday high of $342.89, briefly pushing the company’s market cap to roughly $5.036 trillion before pulling back. Apple needed to close above $340.43 to officially finish the day past the threshold, and it did not quite get there, settling at $340.08 for a valuation of $4.995 trillion. Shares slipped a touch further after hours to $339.85 as of writing.
Apple only crossed $4 trillion in October 2025, meaning it added a trillion dollars in under a year, which is impressive. The stock is up about 24 per cent this year and nearly 60 per cent over the past 12 months, driven mostly by strong iPhone sales.
The bigger story is what Apple has not been doing. While Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon pour tens of billions into data centres and AI hardware, Apple has stayed almost entirely out of that race. Its capital expenditure budget for 2026 sits around $14 billion US. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s is roughly a whopping $205 billion US.
Also, the global memory and storage shortage driven by AI demand has pushed Apple to raise prices on Macs and iPads. iPhone pricing has held so far, but we may see things change in September.
The market cap milestone lands two days before Apple reports quarterly earnings this week (Thursday), and that report carries some extra weight, as it will be Tim Cook’s last as CEO before John Ternus takes over next month.
Want to see more of our stories on Google?
P.S. Want to keep this site truly independent? Support us by buying us a beer, treating us to a coffee, or shopping through Amazon here. Links in this post are affiliate links, so we earn a tiny commission at no charge to you. Thanks for supporting independent Canadian media!
