A single NVIDIA share bought at its January 1999 initial public offering price of $12 is now 480 shares after six stock splits. At the closing price of $162.85 on November 13, 2026, that stake was worth about $78,168, or about 6,500 times the $12 paid, a price gain of roughly 651,000% (about 37% a year). At the stock's October 2026 peak, the same 480 shares were worth about $114,800, a gain of almost 957,000%. In the five weeks since that peak, and especially in the week after chief executive Jensen Huang resigned on November 12 following a board investigation into an alleged Chinese espionage operation, the stock fell by about a third, and NVIDIA slipped from the world's most valuable company back to second place, behind Apple.

This is a history of the numbers, not investment advice. Past returns do not predict future returns; most of NVIDIA's gain happened in a few of its 27 years as a public company, and nothing here recommends buying or selling any security.

The short version

• NVIDIA has split its stock six times since its 1999 IPO. One original share is now 480 shares.
• From its $12 IPO price to its November 13, 2026 close, the split-adjusted share price rose about 651,000% (about 37% a year).
• NVIDIA passed Microsoft in June 2025 to become the world's most valuable public company, reached a $4 trillion market value in July 2025 and a $5 trillion value in October 2025, then traded the top spot with Apple through 2026.
• In October 2026 NVIDIA's market value fell by roughly $830 billion (about 14% from its peak) amid a broader selloff in AI-linked stocks, then fell further after Huang's November 12 resignation.
• At the November 13, 2026 close, NVIDIA was worth about $3.93 trillion, behind Apple (about $5.18 trillion) and just ahead of Microsoft (about $3.89 trillion).
• NVIDIA's trailing price-to-earnings ratio has fallen from about 57 in mid-2025 to about 21 now, as both earnings growth and, most recently, the falling share price have closed the gap.

From graphics cards to the world's most valuable company

Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem incorporated NVIDIA in California in April 1993 to build graphics chips for video games and workstations, and it went public on January 22, 1999, at $12 a share. For most of its first 15 years as a public company, it traded as an ordinary semiconductor stock, rising and falling with PC and graphics-card demand and repeatedly losing most of its value in downturns, including a fall of almost 80% from its 2007 peak during the 2008 financial crisis. Its CUDA software platform, launched in 2006, let programmers run general computing on its graphics chips, which became the hardware of choice first for cryptocurrency mining and, from the early 2010s, for training the large neural networks behind the deep learning and, later, generative AI booms. NVIDIA's stock has risen about twelvefold since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, as demand for the data centre chips that train and run AI models accelerated.

NVIDIA has split its stock six times, each time lowering the per-share price without changing what an investor's stake was worth at the time of the split.

Is it still the biggest company in the world

No, not at the moment. NVIDIA overtook Microsoft to become the world's most valuable public company in June 2025, was the first company to reach a $4 trillion market value on July 9, 2025, and the first to reach $5 trillion in October 2025. Through 2026, it traded the title back and forth with Apple several times, including a loss of roughly $830 billion in market value (about 14% from its peak) during a broader selloff in AI-linked stocks in October 2026. The chart below tracks the approximate market value of the three companies that have held the top spot over the past two years.

On November 13, 2026, the close of trading two days after NVIDIA's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation, the three largest US public companies by market value were:

What investors are paying for a dollar of earnings

A price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio compares a company's share price with its profit per share, and a falling ratio can mean the price fell, the earnings grew, or both. NVIDIA's trailing P/E (share price divided by the last 12 months of reported earnings per share) has fallen steadily over the past 18 months.

From mid-2025 to mid-2026, the ratio fell even as NVIDIA's market value kept rising, because its reported earnings grew faster than its share price. Since then, both the price and the ratio have fallen together. At the November 13, 2026 close, NVIDIA's trailing P/E of 20.6 was below Apple's 39.7, Microsoft's 27.3 and Amazon's 21.6, and analysts' average earnings forecasts for the next 12 months implied a forward P/E of about 13.5, down from a forward P/E of about 39.8 eighteen months earlier (July 2025).

What this does and does not show

• Not investment advice. We do not know any reader's goals, time horizon, or risk tolerance, and nothing here recommends buying, holding, or selling any security. A low P/E ratio does not by itself mean a stock is cheap, and a falling price can continue to fall.
• The scandal is recent and unresolved. As of November 14, 2026, NVIDIA's board has named chief financial officer Colette Kress interim chief executive while it searches for a permanent successor, and the underlying espionage allegations against Jensen Huang have not been confirmed by US authorities. Later developments could change the numbers in this article.
• Market capitalisation for the three-company-race chart is approximate. We multiplied each day's closing price by each company's shares outstanding as of November 2026, rather than the shares outstanding on that specific day. All three companies buy back stock, so their true past market values were very slightly higher than shown.
• Most of NVIDIA's lifetime gain is concentrated in a short period. The stock lost more than 80% of its value at least twice (2002 and 2008) and traded sideways for years at a time; an investor who did not hold the stock for its entire history, or who bought near a peak, would have a very different result from the headline 37% a year.
• P/E ratios use trailing reported earnings and analysts' forward estimates, both of which can be revised, restated, or affected by one-off items.

Method and data

Data retrieved November 14, 2026. Share prices are split-adjusted daily and monthly closing prices from Yahoo Finance. Market values are share price multiplied by shares outstanding (24.15 billion for NVIDIA, 14.54 billion for Apple, 7.43 billion for Microsoft, derived from each company's reported market capitalisation and price on November 13, 2026). Charts and figures are our own derived work from these sources and are not endorsed by them.

• NVIDIA Investor Relations, Investor FAQs, for the IPO date and price and confirmation of the stock split dates.
• Yahoo Finance, NVDA historical prices and Nvidia's stock split history, for daily and monthly split-adjusted prices and split ratios, and the quarterly market value and trailing and forward P/E history.
• stockanalysis.com, NVIDIA (NVDA) statistics and valuation, for the November 13, 2026 market value, shares outstanding, and P/E ratios.
• MetaCap, Nasdaq 100 stocks, for the November 13, 2026 market values and P/E ratios of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
• Council on Foreign Relations, Jensen Huang Resigns From Nvidia, and NPR Illinois, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang steps down amid alleged spy scandal, for the November 12, 2026 resignation and the allegations against Huang.
• CNBC, Apple, Nvidia vie for title of world's most valuable company, and Yahoo Finance (CNN), How Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company, in 4 charts, for the timeline of the two companies' market value lead changes.