Nvidia on Tuesday vaulted past Microsoft to become the most valuable publicly listed company in the world, highlighting its place on the forefront of Big Tech.
Nvidia’s stock price rose nearly $5, or 3.7%, to $135.77, valuing the AI chip maker at $3.33 trillion, compared with $3.31 trillion for Microsoft and $3.29 trillion for Apple, which boasted the largest market capitalization until being surpassed by Microsoft earlier this year.
Nvidia shares have shot up more than 174% this year, propelled by surging investment in artificial intelligence.
The ascent of Microsoft and Apple harken back to previous technologies, but Nvdia’s startling rise in recent years has been powered by surging demand for its chips, which are helping to power massive corporate spending on all things AI, and its data center business.
Nvidia is also a leader in graphics processing hardware, cloud services and other technologies for high-performance computing, while expanding into other emerging sectors such as robotics and autonomous driving.
Nvidia, which as of 2020 had annual revenue of $11 billion, now takes in more than twice that amount in a single quarter, while its profits have soared. The company’s leather-jacketed founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, is feted as a visionary for a new era of innovation driven by generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
This is a developing story and will be updated.