Nvidia became the first semiconductor company to lead the world in market capitalization in June 2024.
Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company on June 18, 2024, overtaking Microsoft and Apple. Its market value was driven by extraordinary demand for graphics-processing units used to train and operate artificial-intelligence systems.
Nvidia began as a designer of graphics chips for computer games, but its CUDA software platform helped make its processors useful for general-purpose parallel computing. That foundation positioned the company strongly as cloud providers and technology firms built large AI data centers.
Nvidia’s position at the top changed quickly as share prices moved. It is important not to confuse market capitalization leadership with being the largest semiconductor manufacturer by physical production; many chips designed by Nvidia are manufactured by outside foundries, especially TSMC.