The crown changed hands on Monday, and the reason was not in California.
Nvidia fell 4.99 percent to $196.51, taking its market capitalisation to roughly $4.76 trillion [1]. That is about $250 billion of value erased in a single session.
Apple rose 1.17 percent to $336.91, reaching about $4.948 trillion, and is once again the most valuable company in the world [1]. The flip happened today: on Friday the implied figures were Nvidia at about $5.01 trillion against Apple at $4.891 trillion [1].
The cause was an initial public offering in Shanghai. ChangXin Memory Technologies listed on the STAR market and rose 466 percent on its debut, raising $8.6 billion and reaching roughly 3.3 trillion yuan - about $487 billion [2]. It is the largest mainland listing since Agricultural Bank of China raised $22.1 billion in 2010 [2].
Alongside it came a report that a Shanghai state-owned enterprise has begun mass-producing immersion DUV lithography systems [3].
The selling spread through everything that competes with, or supplies, memory. SanDisk fell 11 to 12 percent. Western Digital about 7 percent, to $483. SK Hynix 6 to 8 percent. ASML - the Dutch company whose lithography machines the export controls were largely written around - fell about 5 percent [3].
Two cautions on the numbers, because the round figures in circulation overstate them. CXMT's valuation is variously reported at $487 billion, 'over $500 billion' and $540 billion, and its debut gain at 465 percent, 466 percent and 'over 500 percent.' The most precisely sourced figures are $487 billion and 466 percent, and those are the ones used here [2]. Analyst forecasts for CXMT's 2028 DRAM share also diverge sharply, from about 11 percent to about 18 percent, and this piece does not pick one.
What the day measured is narrower than any forecast. A memory company most American investors could not have named on Friday raised $8.6 billion on Monday, and the largest company in the world changed as a result.
