Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Image: Simon Liu/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The company powering the AI revolution reached a valuation of $1trn for the first time last year and crossed the $2trn threshold only months ago.
Nvidia has overtaken Apple as the second most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation after crossing the $3trn mark this week.
The company hit the milestone at the close of market yesterday (5 June) when it recorded a market capitalisation of nearly $3.02trn – higher than that of Apple, which stood at $2.99trn.
Microsoft remains the world’s most valuable company at a market capitalisation of around $3.15trn. It hit the $3trn mark for the first time in January, riding a wave of financial success thanks to a focus on AI. Apple became the first company to cross the $3trn mark back in early 2022.
But of all the major technology companies, chipmaker Nvidia is perhaps the one to have benefitted most from the global AI rush – powering the hardware (including the popular H100 chips) behind some of the world’s leading developers of generative artificial intelligence.
Meteoric rise
Two weeks ago, Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue of $26bn marking an 18pc increase over the previous quarter and a 262pc increase over the same period last year. Net income shot up too, going from $2bn a year ago to nearly $15bn as of last month.
CEO and founder Jensen Huang said at the time that the “next industrial revolution has begun”.
“Companies and countries are partnering with Nvidia to shift the trillion-dollar traditional data centres to accelerated computing and build a new type of data centre – AI factories – to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence,” Huang said.
“AI will bring significant productivity gains to nearly every industry and help companies be more cost- and energy-efficient, while expanding revenue opportunities.”
The results followed a successful year for Nvidia. It reached a valuation of $1trn last year thanks to its focus on AI chips and briefly hit the $2trn valuation earlier this year, a feat it achieved again in March.
In March, Nvidia unveiled its Blackwell products as the successors to its powerful AI chips, which many AI companies have used to support the development of their models.
Earlier in the year, Nvidia found itself in legal trouble after a trio of authors sued the company, claiming it used copyrighted books to train one of its AI models.
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Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Image: Simon Liu/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
