AMD Hits $1 Trillion Market Cap: 3 Reasons Nvidia Sat Out the AI Rally

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) touched a $1 trillion market value for the first time on Monday, peaking at $615.99 a share before easing back below that line.

The stock last traded at $609.65, up over 8%, for a market capitalization of $995 billion. Nvidia gained 2.33% over the same session.

AMD Passed a Milestone Intel Could Not

Intel actually climbed further, rising 12.03% to $121.67. Arm Holdings gained 15.47%. Neither came near the line. Intel is worth $639.32 billion, Arm $339.93 billion.

The milestone, not the size of the move, made AMD the story. It becomes the fourth US chipmaker valued above $1 trillion, after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron.

3 Reasons Nvidia Sat Out the Rally

The first is what investors were buying. Meta’s consumer AI agent Muse reached the top of Apple’s US App Store, and traders read that uptake as proof that answering live user requests, a process called inference, will need far more central processing units (CPUs) working alongside graphics chips. Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan described the squeeze at the Splunk conference in Denver last week.

“CPU demand is so high that we can only supply 50% of customers,” said Lip-Bu Tan, chief executive at Intel.

Nvidia sells mainly graphics processors, so money chasing CPU suppliers routed around it.

The second is company-specific. TrendForce reported on September 18 that AMD warned customers of increases near 10% on AI accelerators, graphics chips and motherboard chipsets from the fourth quarter, passing on higher costs from Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC. Ryzen desktop processors were not named. That lifts AMD margins alone.

The third is scale, and it cuts both ways. Nvidia did rise. At $5.49 trillion, its 2.33% added roughly $128 billion in a single session, more than a third of Arm’s entire value. Sitting out looks different at that size. Measured in percentages, which is how Monday was scored, it barely registered.

BeInCrypto flagged this rotation on Sept. 10, when Intel and AMD broke multi-month downtrends while Nvidia gained 2.12%. AMD closed at $521.10 that day.

The move lands inside a live argument over whether AI spending has peaked. Chip stocks sold off earlier in September after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei warned of a slowdown.

Fourth-quarter results will show whether the price increases reach the income statement, or whether Monday bought demand that has not arrived.