The AI rout handed Apple back the world's biggest-company crown. Nvidia's week is getting worse.

On Tuesday, Nvidia was the world's most valuable company, worth $4.99tn against Apple's $4.84tn. By Thursday's close, Apple was worth $5.00tn and Nvidia $4.39tn, a gap of about $615bn. In three trading days, the AI boom's flagship lost its crown and nearly $600bn of value.

The trigger was a crash. The Nasdaq fell 5.5% on Thursday and the main index of chip stocks fell more than 12%, on fears that a Democratic Congress will bring tougher rules on AI and slow the construction of data centres. Nvidia fell 9.3% to $181.60. Its exposure is unusually direct: its data-centre business produced $89bn of the $96bn in revenue it reported for its second quarter.

Traders now expect the reversal to stick. They put the chance that Apple is the largest company at the end of December at 65% (as of 8 November), up 22 points in a week, against 34.5% for Nvidia, down 19 points. A week ago those odds were roughly reversed.

A lead that lasted three days

The two have swapped places repeatedly in recent weeks. On 30 October, as chip stocks sank and the semiconductor index lost more than 15% over the month, Apple closed at $5.03tn against Nvidia's $4.93tn. Nvidia took the title back on Election Day, helped by strong results from AMD and by Apple's own warning that memory prices were squeezing its margins: Apple guided its December-quarter gross margin to 45% to 46%, down from 47.9%.

Then came Thursday. Apple, whose business does not depend on data-centre demand the way Nvidia's does, fared better in the sell-off. It also sold about $7.5bn of bonds on Thursday, its first such sale since May 2025.

The near-term market is even more emphatic: traders give Apple 74% to be the largest at the end of November. That contract has seen only about $36,000 of trading, so it is a weaker signal than the year-end one, which has drawn $1.5mn. But both point the same way.

A second problem that is about one man

Nvidia's week was already bad before the weekend. On 29 October the New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies had assessed Alice Huang, a former senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that buys Nvidia equipment and rents out computing power, as an intelligence asset gathering information for Beijing. Surveillance, the paper reported, showed she was in contact with an American later identified as Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive. She is not related to him.

On Saturday, TechCrunch reported that the Financial Times had added a further claim: that the intelligence memo also alleged Huang had a romantic relationship with her. These are allegations from a memo, and the reporting offers no independent confirmation. It has not been established that Huang knowingly shared confidential information or knew of her alleged activities, nor what, if anything, she passed on. Nvidia's spokesman has said the interactions were routine and involved "ordinary business information", not trade secrets or national security material. Huang has called Nvidia's dealings with Megaspeed "normal and not unusual". China's embassy called the allegations "groundless smears and slanders". Megaspeed says it has hired outside lawyers and will cooperate with US authorities.

Congress is now involved. In a letter dated 4 November, the chairs of the House Foreign Affairs, China and Intelligence committees asked Huang for a closed-door briefing on 18 November. "It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk," they wrote. That is a request for a briefing rather than a formal inquiry; Nvidia did not comment on the letter.

Why the two stories compound

An AI sell-off is about the price of the whole sector. A scandal around a chief executive is about one company. Nvidia now faces both, on top of the longer fight over how many advanced chips it can sell to China. Apple has its own problems, chiefly memory costs, but none that put its leadership under a congressional spotlight.

The broader market is not predicting a collapse. Traders put the chance that the AI bubble bursts by 31 December at only 9%, though the figure for 30 June 2027 is 26.5%, up 4 points in a week. And the chance that Anthropic lists its shares by 30 November is 78.5%, barely changed on the week and 87% by year end. The reading that fits all three: investors are marking down the most exposed companies and pausing before the next one, not abandoning the sector.

What would make traders wrong

The cleanest test arrives on 17 November, when Nvidia reports results for the quarter that ended on 25 October. Another jump in data-centre revenue could restore the sense that demand is outrunning fears of regulation, and a $615bn gap is only a 14% rise in Nvidia's share price away from closing. Apple, for its part, has a year-end quarter in which memory costs bite. The intelligence story may also fade: the allegations are unproven.