NVIDIA CLAIMS CROWN AS WORLD'S MOST VALUABLE COMPANY

The company’s rise is staggering. Just two years ago, Nvidia’s market cap was $400 billion, but its stock has soared nearly 850% since late 2022, propelled by AI demand.

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In 2024 alone, it tripled in value, hitting $3.34 trillion in June to overtake Microsoft and Apple briefly before reclaiming the top spot multiple times. Posts on X celebrated the feat, with some calling it “unbelievable” for adding $3 trillion in 20 months, though others warned of volatility after a $250 billion single-day drop earlier this year.

Nvidia’s journey reflects a bold bet on AI by CEO Jensen Huang, who pivoted the company from gaming chips to AI infrastructure over a decade ago. With 80% of the AI chip market and a robust ecosystem of software like CUDA, Nvidia stands as a cornerstone of the AI revolution, but its high valuation—32 times forward earnings—raises questions about sustainability in a competitive field.

FROM GAMING TO AI DOMINANCE

Founded in 1993 by Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, Nvidia started as a video game chipmaker, launching the NV1 graphics accelerator in 1995. Early struggles, including a failed Sega contract, nearly bankrupted the company, but a $5 million investment from Sega and the 1996 RIVA 128’s success turned the tide. By 2016, Nvidia’s GTX 1080 solidified its lead in gaming GPUs, holding an 88% share of the discrete GPU market by 2024.

The turning point came in the early 2000s when Huang foresaw GPUs’ potential beyond gaming. The 2006 launch of CUDA, a software platform enabling GPUs for general-purpose computing, positioned Nvidia for the AI boom.

By 2012, researchers used Nvidia GPUs to dominate an image recognition competition, proving their power for AI’s parallel processing needs. This sparked demand from tech giants, with Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips becoming the backbone of data centers powering ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.