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With the AI boom on Wall Street showing no signs of stopping, chip designer NVIDIA Corporation has made history by becoming the most valuable company in the world. NVIDIA's closing market value today sat at $3.33 trillion, which was roughly $18 billion higher than the market cap of the previous most valuable company in the world, Microsoft, according to data from the NASDAQ exchange. Today's close marks the first time that NVIDIA has managed to eke past Microsoft, and over the course of this month, the firm has crossed and then dropped below Apple's market value several times.
NVIDIA Gains 3.5% In A Day To Soar Past Microsoft & Become World's Most Valuable Company
NVIDIA's rise to become the world's most valuable company follows a string of quarterly results that have seen the firm grow its revenue and profit by triple digit percentages. At the heart of its success are the firm's AI accelerators and GPUs, which have captured Wall Street and the industry's attention. Set up in the early 1990s, NVIDIA's history first saw it target consumers with its graphics card that were used to run and play video games.
However, over the course of time, the firm diversified its business model and developed products solely used to run and train artificial intelligence models. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has been personally involved in delivering GPUs to Microsoft backed OpenAI for its ChatGPT and other AI products, and the firm also stands out from others by guiding its customers on how to use its products.
This has enabled NVIDIA's products to target a wide array of industries including high end computing, self driving, biotechnology and supercomputing, to name a few. While it has faced some turbulence in its history, with the shares crashing along with the cryptocurrency industry, NVIDIA has persisted and it now stands right at the top of the market value food chain.
NVIDIA's rise to the top also eclipses Intel's fall from grace. Widely heralded as having invented the microprocessor, Intel is not only older than NVIDIA but has also commanded the semiconductor industry for years in its history. However, the rise of the contract chip manufacturing model led by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and the unique suitability of NVIDIA's accelerators and GPUs to AI processing has ensured that when it comes to semiconductors today, GPUs reign supreme over CPUs.
According to NASDAQ data, Intel's last market value is $130 billion, which makes NVIDIA's market cap of $3,335 billion roughly 25 times that of Intel's. Among the top three most valuable companies in the world right now, namely Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA, NVIDIA is also the youngest. Apple and Microsoft, like Intel, are early players in Silicon Valley's history, while NVIDIA was set up decades later by Huang and his partners.
As for NVIDIA and Intel's smaller rival AMD, the firm's latest market value is $249 billion, more than twice that of Intel. This is despite the fact that Intel possesses considerable resources to not only design but also manufacture its own processors that compete with AMD's products. AMD's primary contract manufacturer TSMC, whose shares also trade on the NYSE through depository receipts, has a market value of $748 billion - higher than both Intel and AMD put together.
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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