NVIDIA became the first semiconductor-focused company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization.
NVIDIA crossed the milestone in May 2023 after reporting exceptionally strong expectations for demand for its artificial-intelligence data-center processors. Investors saw its graphics-processing units, or GPUs, as central infrastructure for training and running large AI models.
The company began in 1993 as a graphics-chip designer for computer games. Its CUDA software platform later helped make NVIDIA hardware useful for scientific computing, machine learning, and data-center workloads.
NVIDIA’s achievement is distinct from the earlier trillion-dollar milestones of companies such as Apple and Microsoft. Those companies operate across many major businesses, whereas NVIDIA’s valuation surge was particularly associated with accelerated computing and AI chips.