Apple stock briefly tops $5 trillion, becoming only the second company to reach the milestone

Apple stock touched an intraday high of $342.89 on Tuesday, a gain of 1.8%, before retreating from that level. A closing price above $340.43 would be required for Apple to finish the session with a market cap exceeding $5 trillion.

Nvidia $NVDA was the first company to hit $5 trillion, reaching the mark in October 2025. Nvidia stock has gained about 6% this year, while Apple stock is up roughly 25% over the same period. Apple also passed Nvidia on Monday to become the most valuable publicly traded company.

The milestone comes ahead of Apple's quarterly earnings report on Thursday, which will be CEO Tim Cook's last before John Ternus takes over on Sept. 1.

Apple has taken a strikingly different approach from Alphabet $GOOGL, Amazon $AMZN, Meta $META, and Microsoft $MSFT, which together plan to spend hundreds of billions on AI this year; instead, Apple has held its own capital expenditures down and tapped Google for cloud and AI services — including a deal to use Google's Gemini models to power an upgraded Siri, according to Yahoo Finance. The revamped Siri is expected to launch as a beta this fall alongside new iPhone hardware, including Apple's first foldable iPhone.

Investors had spent several years criticizing Apple for falling behind in the AI race. Sentiment has since reversed, however, as questions mount over whether companies pouring money into AI can sustain the spending — with many taking on significant debt and burning through cash without a visible route to profitability. Microsoft stock, to cite one example, has shed approximately 28% since its record closing price of $542.07 reached in October 2025.

Apple has not been untouched by AI's broader effects on the industry. A global shortage of memory and storage chips, itself a byproduct of surging AI demand, has driven up component costs that Apple has passed along to consumers through price increases on MacBooks and iPads. On Tuesday, the company announced a program called Upgrade that will allow U.S. customers to lease iPhones and other products rather than purchase them.

Because Apple only surpassed the $4 trillion mark in October 2025, Tuesday's milestone arrived in fewer than twelve months.