Nvidia became the world’s most valuable public company after briefly passing Microsoft on June 18, 2024.
Nvidia’s market capitalization exceeded Microsoft’s and Apple’s during trading on June 18, 2024. The move followed a dramatic rise in demand for Nvidia’s data-center graphics processing units, which are widely used for artificial-intelligence training and inference.
Nvidia began as a graphics-chip company focused on computer games, but its programmable GPU architecture also proved powerful for scientific computing and machine learning. The company’s CUDA software platform helped developers use its hardware for workloads far beyond traditional graphics.
The title was temporary: market-cap leadership depends on live share prices, and Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple continued to trade close to one another. A claim about the “world’s most valuable company” therefore needs a date and should specify that it means publicly traded market capitalization.