Market royalty is getting a hardware makeover.
Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) just climbed past $1 trillion in market capitalization, making it the latest company tied to the AI build-out to enter the market’s most exclusive tier.
It’s joining Nvidia (NVDA), TSMC (TSM), and Broadcom (AVGO) in a newer class of giants that make the chips, memory, and infrastructure behind the boom.
The $1 trillion club was once mostly a monument to US platform power.
Apple (AAPL) became the first US public company to hit the mark in August 2018, followed quickly by Amazon (AMZN) and then Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta (META), and Tesla (TSLA).
That first modern wave was built around smartphones, cloud, search, social media, e-commerce, and electric vehicle momentum.
The newer wave is more physical.
Nvidia crossed $1 trillion in May 2023 as the artificial intelligence compute trade exploded. TSMC followed in 2024 as investors rewarded the world’s most important advanced-chip manufacturer. Broadcom joined later that year, lifted by demand for custom AI chips and networking.
Now Samsung adds another piece of the stack: memory, including high-bandwidth memory used in AI systems.
The AI boom isn’t just lifting the companies building consumer-facing tools or software. It is also pulling the suppliers of the scarce computing parts into the market’s top tier.
The club is not all chips, though.
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) crossed $1 trillion in 2024 as the first US non-tech company to do so. Walmart (WMT) became the first retailer to join in 2026.
Meanwhile, Eli Lilly (LLY) briefly made it on GLP-1 demand, while Saudi Aramco (2222.SR) and PetroChina (0857.HK) show that commodity giants have had their own trillion-dollar moments.
But the newest cluster is coming from AI infrastructure.
At the very top of the market, AI is rewarding the bottlenecks.
Jared Blikre is the global markets and data editor for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @SPYJared or email him at jaredblikre@yahooinc.com.
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