Nvidia became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company in 2024 after an artificial-intelligence-driven rally.
Nvidia briefly overtook Microsoft and Apple in June 2024 to become the company with the highest market capitalization worldwide. Investors focused on Nvidia’s dominant position in high-performance GPUs used for artificial-intelligence training and inference.
Nvidia’s ascent followed years of investment in parallel computing. Its CUDA programming platform, launched in 2006, allowed developers to use Nvidia GPUs for tasks beyond graphics. That software ecosystem helped make the company’s hardware especially valuable for modern AI workloads.
The ranking changed repeatedly during 2024 as the share prices of Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple moved. “Most valuable company” in this context means highest market capitalization, not highest revenue, profit, assets, or brand value. Nvidia’s stock later underwent a 10-for-1 split in June 2024, which changed the quoted share price without changing the company’s underlying market value at the time.