Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has sold roughly $36.4 million (£27m) in the company’s stock as part of a pre-arranged plan, a few days after the graphics chip maker became the world’s first publicly traded company to reach a market value of $4tn.

Huang sold some 225,000 shares late last week, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as part of a deal agreed in March to sell up to six million Nvidia shares this year.

He sold the first tranche of stock under that agreement in June, amounting to about $15m.

$4tn valuation

Huang sold about $700m of shares last year under a prearranged plan.

Nvidia’s shares rose on Wednesday, 9 July to bring the company over the $4tn mark in overall market valuation, as investors bet that it would continue to benefit from the AI boom in spite of broader economic and trade turmoil.

The rise in Nvidia’s value helped propel Huang’s net worth higher than that of Warren Buffet last week, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

Nvidia has skyrocketed in value since November 2022, when OpenAI publicly released its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot and kicked off a rush by large companies and start-ups alike to invest in the technology.

Nvidia’s chips control the vast majority of the AI accelerator market, with its closest rivals being AMD and, in mainland China, Huawei Technologies.

AI boom

US-based Nvidia reached $1tn in market capitalisation for the first time in June 2023 and has continued to climb rapidly as investors increasingly view its products as akin to gold or oil, a scarce resource underlying the rise of AI.

Nvidia reported total revenues of $44.1bn in the first quarter as demand for its products continued to rise, 69 percent up from the same period a year earlier.