Nvidia reached another milestone in its rise to becoming one of the world's most important companies: the first publicly traded company to reach a market value of $4 trillion. Nvidia and other companies benefiting from the boom in artificial intelligence have been a major reason the S&P 500 has recently climbed to a record.

Nvidia holds a 7.3% weight on the S&P 500, the biggest on the index.

Nvidia’s chips power the data centers that companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google need to fuel their AI models and cloud services — and AI investments are only expected to grow.