Will Apple be the largest company by the end of 2026?

The AI industry has dominated growth charts for the last five years, helping Nvidia and several other tech companies gain trillions of dollars in value. 

Subsequently, Nvidia grew to become the biggest company in the world by market capitalization, which currently stands at about $5.42 trillion. Apple, which was the biggest company in the world for several years, has since lost the crown to the GPU maker, with a market cap of just under $5 billion. 

Nvidia’s value is just over 8% higher than Apple’s, and given the level of price movements that technology stocks tend to experience, it is not uncommon to lose or gain 5% within a short period. 

So perhaps this is also why “the largest company by the end of 2026” market on Polymarket has attracted so much volume to date, with over $7.5 million locked in. Nvidia and Apple are not the only options. They are joined by fellow tech giants Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, as well as Tesla and SpaceX.

Nvidia currently has the highest volume locked in, with nearly $1.3 million, while Apple has seen traders commit about $952k.

Alphabet, which is currently third with a 6% chance, has $738k locked in, while Microsoft, with about a 1% chance, boasts $983k in volume. 

So clearly, Nvidia is the outright favorite both percentage-wise and volume-wise. But could Apple deliver a surprise?

Could Apple be a smart play?

Since the start of the year, Apple’s chance of being the largest company by the end of 2026 on Polymarket has remained below 25%, apart from the period between July 17th and July 31st, when it crossed 35% on three occasions. 

The latest spike on September 16, just two days before the release of the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, only managed to reach 23.8%.

However, Apple stock tends to perform well in the final quarter of the year, experiencing gains in 19 Q4s over the last 20 years. This is often due to the impact of the new iPhone releases in September. 

However, the latest version of the iPhone is facing some software challenges, and analysts are already predicting a double-digit decline in sales for the year compared to the iPhone 17 series. 

But that is not what the early sales numbers are saying. Initial reports show promising figures, with1.3 million iPhone Pro units reportedly sold in the first week in China. That is about 15% more than the iPhone 17 series sales over the same period.

The other factor that could be in favor of Apple surpassing Nvidia is the talk of the AI bubble bursting. 

Although Polymarket data on Monday pointed to a 9% chance of the AI bubble bursting before the end of the year, any market correction was never expected to happen overnight. 

Many AI stocks have experienced choppy price movements over the last few months without ever reclaiming the all-time highs reached earlier this year. Nvidia, for example, is up just 2.6% since August 7. Apple, on the other hand, is up 8.7% over the same period.