Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization in June 2024 amid the artificial-intelligence chip boom.
Nvidia briefly took the top position on June 18, 2024, after its shares surged and its market value exceeded those of Microsoft and Apple. The company’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, became central hardware for training and running large artificial-intelligence models.
Nvidia began as a graphics-chip company focused on computer games, but its CUDA software platform helped make its processors useful for general-purpose parallel computing. That foundation later supported demand from data centers and AI developers.
The leadership changed repeatedly among Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. Such rankings are snapshots rather than permanent classifications, because market capitalization moves whenever share prices change.