Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company in June 2024 during the artificial-intelligence boom. Its market capitalization rose above those of Microsoft and Apple as investors focused on demand for accelerated computing and data-center processors.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It became famous for graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were originally developed mainly for computer graphics and video games. The same parallel-processing architecture later proved highly useful for machine-learning workloads.
Nvidia designs chips and software but generally relies on contract manufacturers, especially Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, to fabricate advanced processors. Its CUDA software platform also helped make its hardware attractive to researchers and developers. Market capitalization measures share price multiplied by shares outstanding, so rankings can change rapidly as stock prices move.