Nvidia on Tuesday became the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion surpassingMicrosoftand Apple. Driven by the global AI frenzy and rising demand for AI processors, Nvidia is the first semiconductor firm ever to become the world’s most valuable company.
Just a few months ago Nvidia’s market capitalization was around $2.2 trillion and the company was behind Microsoft and Apple, but ahead of Saudi Aramco andAmazonin the Top 5 largest companies by market cap list. Then Nvidia announced itsQ1 FY2024 financial results, posting revenue of $26.044 billion and earning a net income of $14.881 billion. Nvidia said it expected to earn $28 billion in the second quarter, greatly increasing investors’s confidence and the company’s market capitalization.Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive Jensen Huang then took a tour around the world to discuss the company’s prowess at AI, as well as Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell hardware, which further increased confidence. Nvidia’s stock has gained over 160% in 2024 alone, adding more than $2 trillion to its market cap. Fast forward to June 18 and Nvidia is now the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization.Nvidia’s remarkable growth is fueled by the surging demand for its processors for AI and HPC, particularly theNvidia H100andNvidia H200. And its bench is deep: The company already has itsBlackwell B200 family of productsset to enter the market later this year and is currently ramping up for that release — that’s in addition to anticipatedBlackwell RTX 50-series GPUsfor client and professional workspaces. With Blackwell, Nvidia will offer not only processors and servers but entire data centers in essence, which is likely to further increase the company’s earnings.Analysts polled byBloombergbelieve that market capitalizations for the most successful technology companies could pass the $4 trillion mark, a truly stunning level. For now, all three contenders to be the first $4 trillion company — Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple — are well positioned to take advantage of the AI frenzy, albeit on different levels.“We believe over the next year the race to $4 trillion market cap in tech will be front and center between Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft,” Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities wrote in a note published byBloomberg.Elon Musk tweeted about his desire to purchase 300,000 Blackwell B200 GPUsonce those become available, and he won’t be alone in lining up to buy them.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
