Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) achieved a $1 trillion market value for the initial time on Monday, climbing as high as $615.99 per share prior to pulling back beneath that threshold.
The stock most recently changed hands at $609.65, representing a gain of over 8% and pushing its market capitalization to $995 billion. Meanwhile, Nvidia advanced 2.33% during the same trading session.
AMD Passed a Milestone Intel Could Not
Intel actually posted a stronger percentage gain, surging 12.03% to $121.67, while Arm Holdings advanced 15.47%. Even so, neither reached the $1 trillion mark; Intel closed with a valuation of $639.32 billion and Arm at $339.93 billion.
The significance lay in the milestone itself rather than the magnitude of the daily gain, making AMD the central focus. It now stands as the fourth American semiconductor company to surpass a $1 trillion valuation, joining Nvidia, Broadcom, and Micron.
3 Reasons Nvidia Sat Out the Rally
The primary factor driving the movement was the specific asset investors targeted. After Meta’s consumer AI agent Muse climbed to the top of the US Apple App Store, market participants interpreted the adoption surge as a signal that handling live user queries—a process known as inference—will require substantially more central processing units (CPUs) operating in tandem with graphics chips. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan highlighted this supply constraint during last week’s Splunk conference in Denver.
“CPU demand is so high that we can only supply 50% of customers,” said Lip-Bu Tan, chief executive at Intel.
Because Nvidia focuses primarily on sales of graphics processors, capital flowing toward CPU manufacturers bypassed it.
The second catalyst relates directly to company developments. TrendForce disclosed on September 18 that AMD had informed clients of impending price hikes of nearly 10% on AI accelerators, graphics chips, and motherboard chipsets beginning in the fourth quarter, effectively passing along rising manufacturing costs from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Ryzen desktop processors were excluded from the advisory. This dynamic stands to bolster AMD’s profit margins independently.
The third reason involves sheer scale, which operates in both directions. Nvidia did not decline; at a valuation of $5.49 trillion, its 2.33% daily increase generated approximately $128 billion in value—an amount exceeding one-third of Arm’s total worth. At that magnitude, sitting out a rally takes on a different meaning, even if it appears minimal when measured purely by daily percentage gains.
BeInCrypto previously highlighted this market rotation on Sept. 10, when Intel and AMD broke out of multi-month downtrends while Nvidia posted a 2.12% increase. AMD finished that session at $521.10.
This market activity unfolds amid an ongoing debate regarding whether artificial intelligence expenditures have reached their ceiling. Earlier in the month, semiconductor equities experienced a sell-off following warnings of a potential slowdown issued by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Upcoming fourth-quarter financial reports will determine whether these price bumps successfully translate to the income statement or if Monday’s momentum simply anticipated demand that has yet to materialize.