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When Apple Passed Microsoft in 2010, Nvidia Was a $9 Billion Graphics-Card Company. Its Gaming Chips Now Make It Worth $5.1 Trillion
In May 2010 Apple passed Microsoft at about $226 billion. Nvidia ended that year worth $8.94 billion. In October 2026 Nvidia is worth about $5.1 trillion, and the chips that got it there were built for video games.
LockerGnome ran “Apple to pass Microsoft in value” on March 30, 2010. It took eight weeks. On May 26, Apple’s shares rose to $248.47, “pushing its market cap up to about $226 billion,” the Associated Press reported that night, while Microsoft’s stock “slipped to $25.49, for market cap of about $223 billion.”
Only one U.S. company was worth more. Exxon Mobil’s market cap was “about $281 billion.”
Apple had just shipped a new kind of computer, too. It sold “over 300,000 iPads in the US as of midnight Saturday, April 3,” Apple said, four days after that LockerGnome headline ran.
Nobody in that race was looking at Nvidia. The graphics-chip maker ended 2010 with a market cap of $8.94 billion, per CompaniesMarketCap’s Nvidia history. Apple was worth about 25 Nvidias that day in May.
Here’s the board on October 23, 2026, from CompaniesMarketCap’s live ranking (prices delayed by minutes to hours):
| Rank | Company | Market cap, Oct. 2026 | May 2010 (AP) or end of 2010 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nvidia | $5.112 trillion | $8.94 billion (end of 2010) |
| 2 | Apple | $5.050 trillion | about $226 billion |
| 3 | Alphabet | $3.904 trillion | |
| 4 | Microsoft | $3.896 trillion | about $223 billion |
Apple is worth about 22 times what it was the day it passed Microsoft, per its own history page. Microsoft is worth about 17 times, per its page. Nvidia is worth about 572 times its end-of-2010 value.
The gap between Apple and Microsoft was about $3 billion in 2010. It’s now about $1.15 trillion, more than twice what the two companies were worth together on the day Apple took the lead. What nobody can say yet is whether Nvidia’s $62.3 billion of data center revenue in a single quarter is a new floor or a peak.
The rankings flip faster now than they did in 2010. Apple sits about $60 billion behind Nvidia on a $5 trillion scale, roughly 1%, so one good or bad earnings week can swap the top two. Microsoft and Alphabet are separated by about $8 billion.
What to watch is the customer list. Most of Nvidia’s revenue now comes from its Data Center segment, sold to the companies building AI data centers. If those buyers slow their spending, the chart above reshuffles. If they don’t, the next “pass in value” headline is Nvidia’s distance from everyone else.