Nvidia became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company in June 2024 amid the artificial-intelligence boom.
Nvidia briefly moved ahead of Microsoft and Apple by market capitalization on June 18, 2024. Its share price had surged as investors anticipated enormous demand for graphics-processing units used to train and run artificial-intelligence systems. The ranking changed as stock prices moved, so Nvidia’s lead was a market snapshot rather than a permanent title.
Nvidia began in 1993 and became known for graphics processors used in personal computers and games. Its CUDA software platform and data-center products later made the company especially important to modern AI computing. The company’s high-end accelerators became a central part of the infrastructure built by cloud providers and AI developers.
The event is sometimes described as Nvidia becoming the largest company in the world, but that wording refers to public market capitalization. It does not mean Nvidia had the highest revenue, most employees, or largest physical operations.