By Adam Clark

Nvidia is close to losing its place as the world's largest company by market valuation. But there's a bright side -- it's doing better than its semiconductor peers.

Nvidia shares traded as low as $197.97, before paring those losses on Friday. The stock closed down 2.2% at $202.81.

The stock movement Friday put the company on the brink of having a market capitalization below that of Apple. The iPhone maker surpassed Nvidia in early trading, according to Dow Jones Market Data. However, Nvidia reclaimed the top spot later in morning trading.

At Friday's close, Nvidia has a market value of $4.91 trillion, while Apple has a market cap of about $4.9 trillion, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Nvidia narrowly held onto its now 266 trading day streak as the largest company, since it took the title from Microsoft in June last year.

The reason for the shift is no mystery. Chip stocks have been getting battered in recent weeks, with the PHLX Semiconductor Index falling 1.6% on Friday and down about 18% this month. By those standards, Nvidia is doing reasonably well, up over 1% in July.

Nvidia was a recent Barron's stock pick when it was trading around $226. Wall Street analysts have an average price target of around $314.

For the stock to start moving toward that, it needs Big Tech companies to signal they will continue or accelerate their huge spending on artificial-intelligence hardware in the coming earnings season. Ideally they'd also confirm the superiority of Nvidia's AI chips as well, with the next-generation Vera Rubin beginning to be shipped in mass volumes.

One mixed piece of news for Nvidia was that China's Moonshot AI claimed Friday its Kimi K3 model could outperform some cutting-edge U.S. systems. Moonshot didn't disclose what hardware the AI model was trained on.

If it turns out that Kimi K3 was trained on non-Nvidia hardware -- for example chips from China's Huawei Technologies -- that might challenge the assumption Nvidia's processors are best for AI training. However, it might also spur greater investment from American companies.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 17, 2026 16:45 ET (20:45 GMT)