On November 4th, during trading in the US stock market, Nvidia's market value reached $3.38 trillion, surpassing Apple's market value of $3.35 trillion and ranking first in the US market value. As of the close, Nvidia's stock price rose 0.48% to close at $136.05 per share, with a market value of $3.34 trillion, while Apple's stock price fell 0.4% to close at $222.01 per share, with a market value of $3.36 trillion. Apple once again regained the top spot in the US stock market. In the past two weeks, Nvidia's market value has been close to Apple's, and its intraday market value has exceeded the latter several times, but its closing market value has not yet surpassed it. In June of this year, Nvidia also became the company with the highest stock market value in the United States, but was later overtaken by Apple.
After Apple released its latest quarterly financial report on October 31st local time, the stock price fluctuated. In the latest quarter ending on September 28th, Apple's gross profit margin reached 46.2%, with revenue reaching $94.9 billion, higher than analysts' expectations of $94.36 billion, but there are still some data that falls short of market expectations. In this quarter, Apple paid a one-time tax of $10.2 billion due to the previous ruling by the European Union, resulting in a year-on-year decrease of 35.8% in net profit, recording $14.74 billion. Affected by the decline in net profit in the fourth quarter, Apple's net profit for the 2024 fiscal year was $93.74 billion, lower than the previous fiscal year's net profit of $97 billion.
In addition, Apple's revenue in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and other regions of the Asia Pacific region all recorded year-on-year growth in the quarter, but Apple's revenue from Greater China was only $15.033 billion, lower than analysts' expectations of $15.8 billion, and also declined year-on-year. On the day of the financial report release, Apple's stock price fell by 1.82%. On November 1st, Apple's stock price also fell by 1.33%.
Nvidia recently released news about the progress of Blackwell chip production. Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun recently stated that with the help of TSMC, the design defect of Nvidia's Blackwell architecture chip has been fixed, which had previously affected production. Huang Renxun stated that these chips will be shipped in the fourth quarter.
According to Guo Mingchi, an analyst at Tianfeng International, the order information for the Nvidia Blackwell GB200 chip industry chain recently released shows that Microsoft is currently the world's largest customer of Nvidia Blackwell GB200, with order volume surging 3-4 times in the fourth quarter of this year. Guo Mingchi stated that the expansion of production capacity for Blackwell chips is expected to start in the early fourth quarter of this year, with shipments expected to be between 150000 and 200000 pieces in the fourth quarter. It is expected that shipments will increase by 200% to 250% in the first quarter of 2025, reaching 500000 to 550000 pieces.
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son recently stated that the sustained spending trend in the field of artificial intelligence will only accelerate in the coming years, which will benefit Nvidia and its GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) chip business, which has been the driving force behind most advances in artificial intelligence. Son Masayoshi defines super artificial intelligence as an artificial intelligence system that is 10000 times more powerful than the human brain. He believes that to achieve this level of artificial intelligence, companies will need over 200 million GPU chips and invest $9 trillion in capital expenditures.
Nvidia's third quarter financial report for the fiscal year 2025 has not yet been released, but several tech giants that have released their latest reports have signaled an increase in capital expenditures. These tech giants' actions to increase AI include purchasing GPUs.
Amazon's finance officer stated in the latest conference call that the company's capital investment since the beginning of this year is $51.9 billion, and it is expected that the company's capital expenditure in 2024 will be approximately $75 billion, with most of the expenditure being used to support the growing demand for technology infrastructure, mainly related to AWS, as Amazon continues to invest to support the demand for AI services.
In the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, Microsoft's capital expenditures, including financing leases, were $20 billion, an increase from $19 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024. Microsoft revealed that half of its cloud and AI related expenditures will continue to be used for long-term assets, while the other half will be used for servers (including CPUs and GPUs). Google expects its capital expenditures to be higher in 2025 than in 2024.
In addition, after the market closed on November 1st local time, S&P Global issued a statement stating that in order to ensure that the index has a more representative semiconductor exposure, S&P Dow Jones adjusted the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with Nvidia replacing Intel as a constituent stock, which officially took effect on November 8th. From the first trading day after Nvidia's stock split on June 10th this year to November 1st, Nvidia's stock price has cumulatively risen by 12.02%.