Nvidia Becomes World’s Most Valuable Company

Nvidia, the startup at the centre of the artificial intelligence boom, has become the world’s most valuable company, knocking Microsoft off the top spot. Nvidia’s market capitalisation hit $3.335 trillion on June 18, as shares of the chipmaker rose by 3.5 percent to $135.58.

About Nvidia

Nvidia Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.

World’s second most valuable company

The feat comes just days after the Santa Clara California-based company eclipsed Apple to become the world’s second most valuable company. Shares of Microsoft and Apple, holders of the number two and three spots, fell by 0.45 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively. Nvidia’s rally, which has lifted the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes to record highs, continues a speculator winning streak for the company, whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are integral to the development of AI.

Nvidia’s first focus

Nvidia spent its first few decades focusing mainly on producing chips for computer games. Buoyed by voracious demand for its chips from tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta and Google, the company’s stock price has surged nearly 182 percent this year alone, after more than tripling in 2023. Nvidia controls about 80 percent of the market for AI chips used in data centres needed to run AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. An investor who put $10,000 into the company in 1999 would hold $59,107,800 worth of stock today, according to the Kobeissi Letter newsletter on capital markets.