Nvidia became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company after its 2024 surge driven by AI-chip demand.
Nvidia’s market capitalization rose dramatically in 2024 as businesses and cloud providers raced to build artificial-intelligence systems. Its graphics processing units, or GPUs, are especially suited to the parallel calculations used to train and run many AI models. Strong demand for its data-center products lifted revenue, profits, and investor expectations.
The company was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It originally focused on graphics hardware for personal computers and video games, but its CUDA software platform helped make its GPUs useful for scientific computing and machine learning.
Market-cap leadership can change quickly because it reflects expectations as well as current earnings. Nvidia’s rise illustrates how a specialized semiconductor supplier can briefly outrank much older technology, energy, and consumer companies when a major computing trend accelerates.