Nvidia became the world’s most valuable public company on 18 June 2024.
Nvidia’s market capitalization briefly moved above Microsoft and Apple as its shares continued a powerful rise. Investors were responding to extraordinary demand for the company’s graphics processing units, which are widely used to train and run artificial-intelligence systems.
The company began as a specialist graphics-chip designer, founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. Its CUDA software platform helped make Nvidia hardware useful for general-purpose computing and later became important in AI research and commercial development.
The ranking was based on market capitalization, not revenue or profit. Share prices move continuously, so Nvidia’s lead changed during later trading sessions. The milestone also followed a ten-for-one stock split in June 2024, which reduced the per-share price but did not by itself change the company’s total market value.