Nvidia Becomes World’s Most Valuable Company

Chipmaker Nvidia briefly surpassed Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company on June 18, cementing its status with further gains in the following days. Its value fell soon after, but it remained among the top three most valuable companies the week after its peak.

Nvidia’s peak value of $3.3 trillion came just two weeks after it made headlines for becoming the second most valuable company.

Nvidia’s stock price has roughly tripled since the beginning of 2024, with some of its biggest gains occurring last month. On June 7, it implemented a ten-for-one stock split intended to make the stock more accessible to individual investors.

With about 80% of the market for advanced, AI-capable chips, Nvidia’s industry-leading processors are in high demand from tech giants seeking to expand or power their AI capabilities, including Microsoft, Meta, and Google. Nvidia’s Q1 2024 results, released in late May, showed a year-on-year revenue growth of 262%.

In unveiling the company’s quarterly report, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said:

“The next industrial revolution has begun — companies and countries are partnering with NVIDIA to shift the trillion-dollar traditional data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center — AI factories — to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence.”

Nvidia is not the only semiconductor company to see AI-driven gains. Dell Technologies and Super Micro Computer, which make servers equipped with Nvidia chips, have seen their respective valuations double and triple since the beginning of the year.

Nvidia’s rapid growth has invited comparisons to the dot-com bubble. Wall Street Journal reporter Asa Fitch noted that the last time a computing infrastructure provider was the most valuable company was in March 2000, when Cisco overtook Microsoft. John Chambers, who led Cisco then, told the Journal that there are important differences between then and now, including “the stage when the most valuable company [status] was reached.”