Apple touches $5 trillion market cap for first time

Apple on Tuesday briefly hit a market capitalization of $5 trillion for the first time, a day after passing Nvidia to become the most valuable publicly traded company.

Shares of the iPhone maker, which reports quarterly results on Thursday, have jumped 25% this year, outpacing its megacap peers. The stock reached a high of $342.89 on Tuesday before slipping a bit.

While the hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — are collectively pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into capital expenditures this year for their artificial intelligence buildouts, Apple has kept its capex spending low, and is using cloud infrastructure and AI technology from Google.

Apple trailed its trillion-dollar peers on the market last year as investors worried that the company was missing out on the AI boom by keeping investments in check and delaying the long-awaited rollout of an upgraded Siri, which will be released this fall alongside new iPhone hardware. But the narrative has flipped of late due to concerns that the aggressive tech spenders are raising mounds of debt and going cash flow negative without a clear path to hefty returns.

The debate over the future of AI is embedded in the jockeying between Apple and chipmaker Nvidia for market cap supremacy. Nvidia, whose graphics processing units power most of the big AI models, became the first company to hit the $5 trillion mark in October, but the stock has been a relative laggard this year, gaining only 6%.

Apple's stock has rallied, meanwhile, despite price hikes on devices resulting from the global memory shortage.

On Tuesday, Apple announced Upgrade, a new program that will allow customers in the U.S. to lease iPhones and other products, instead of buying them outright. Last month, the company lifted prices on MacBooks and iPads, its first formal move to pass higher memory and storage costs on to consumers after CEO Tim Cook said increases had become unavoidable.

Thursday's earnings call will be Cook's last as CEO, with John Ternus set to take over on Sept. 1.

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