Apple briefly overtakes Nvidia as most valuable company as AI Siri debuts in iOS 27

Apple briefly reclaimed the title of world's most valuable company, with its market cap touching roughly $4.89 trillion and edging past Nvidia's $4.85 trillion — a symbolic milestone given how much of the AI narrative has centered on Nvidia's chips rather than Apple's late arrival. The catalyst was the debut of an AI-enhanced Siri in iOS 27, which finally shipped after years of delays and public embarrassment.

The new Siri adds semantic search across messages, emails and photos, plus cross-app actions that let it chain tasks between applications — the on-device 'personal context' vision Apple demoed long ago and struggled to deliver. Gizmodo's framing was pointed ('despite its busted AI'), underscoring that investors rewarded Apple's installed base and hardware cycle more than the assistant's raw capability. CNET's hands-on compared the new Siri against the old, finding meaningful but incremental gains.

The competitive and hardware context matters. Reports suggest the iPhone 18 Pro will require at least 12GB of RAM for full Apple Intelligence features, hinting at a device-driven upgrade 'super-cycle' that Forbes flagged as a potential sales tailwind. Apple is simultaneously leaning on partners — Alibaba's Qwen in China and reported chip-company acquisition talks — to close its AI gap rather than build everything in-house.

The skeptical read: a fleeting valuation crossover driven by an iPhone cycle is not the same as AI leadership, and Siri still trails the frontier assistants on reasoning. But for a company written off in the AI race a year ago, retaking the market-cap crown on the back of a shipped AI feature is a notable reversal.