NVIDIA became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company in 2024 amid demand for AI chips.
NVIDIA briefly overtook Microsoft and Apple by market capitalization in June 2024. Its rise was driven by explosive demand for graphics processing units used to train and run artificial-intelligence systems. Major cloud providers and technology companies purchased NVIDIA’s data-center products to support large-scale AI workloads.
NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It began with a focus on graphics processors for personal computers and video games, but its CUDA software platform helped make its hardware useful for general-purpose parallel computing.
The ranking was not permanent: market capitalization changes whenever share prices move, and Apple, Microsoft, and NVIDIA have repeatedly exchanged positions. NVIDIA is also commonly confused with TSMC, which manufactures many chips designed by other companies.