Nvidia became the world’s most valuable listed company by market capitalization in 2024 after a surge in AI demand.
Nvidia briefly overtook Microsoft and Apple in June 2024 as its share price climbed on expectations for extraordinary demand for AI accelerators and data-center systems. Its position changed repeatedly during the year because the three companies had extremely close market values.
Nvidia’s graphics processing units are well suited to the parallel calculations used in machine learning. Its software ecosystem, including CUDA, also helped make Nvidia hardware attractive to developers and cloud-computing providers. Those advantages turned the company into a central supplier for the generative-AI boom.
This ranking is a snapshot, not a permanent title. Market capitalization changes with share prices, and Nvidia’s later stock split changed the number of shares and the per-share price without changing the company’s underlying value by itself. “Most valuable” here means listed equity market capitalization.