How Nvidia plans to spend another year at top

‘The race is on’: Tech giant is trying to ensure its chips are embedded with every new wave of Al-powered innovation

- By Queenie Wong

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang holds up a Rubin GPU and a Vera CPU during a news conference in Las Vegas.

(JOHN LOCHER Associated Press)

Chipmaker Nvidia had a record-setting year in 2025, becoming the world’s most valuable company as the frenzy around artificial intelligence propelled its rise to the top.

Now the Santa Clara giant is positioning itself for another year on top.

“The race is on for AI,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive and co-founder, said at the CES trade show in Las Vegas last week. “Everybody’s trying to get to the next level. Everybody's trying to get to the next frontier.”

The 62-year-old tech mogul, wearing a black crocodile leather jacket, outlined his ambitious vision for the future, one filled with self-driving cars, robots and other intelligent machines that go beyond the digital screen and interact with people in the physical world.

As a keystone in the AI boom, Nvidia has also been caught up in concerns that trillions of dollars are being poured into AI companies that are overhyped and overvalued, forming a bubble that will burst.

Nvidia has helped fuel the fire, investing in companies such as ChatGPT maker Open AI, Intel and CoreWeave. Nvidia has also backed Elon Musk's xAI.

It has been an unprecedented ascent for a high-end chipmaker that wasn’t well known outside some tech circles just five years ago.

The AI bubble is unlikely to burst any time soon, analysts say, and even if it does, Nvidia won't be the hardest hit, as it will continue to dominate the market for high-end AI chips and develop new ways to bring AI into more products.

“Nvidia is going to do just fine,” said Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. “And it is really an indication that we are using AI tools a lot.”

Here are some of the questions that will determine whether this massive company stays on top: