NVIDIA became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company by market capitalization in 2024 after an artificial-intelligence chip boom.
NVIDIA briefly took the top position in June 2024 as investors drove its share price higher. The company’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, became central hardware for training and running large artificial-intelligence models.
Its rise was amplified by strong demand from cloud providers and other technology companies building AI data centers. NVIDIA also develops CUDA, a software platform that helps developers use its processors for general-purpose parallel computing.
Market-cap rankings can change quickly because they depend on share prices and share counts. Microsoft and Apple repeatedly traded near the top, so a date is essential when describing a company as the world’s most valuable.