Nvidia briefly became the world’s largest company by market capitalization in June 2024 after surpassing Apple and Microsoft.
On June 18, 2024, Nvidia’s market value rose above those of Apple and Microsoft, making it the most valuable publicly traded company at that point. The ranking was driven by extraordinary demand for Nvidia’s data-center processors and related systems used in artificial-intelligence computing.
Nvidia’s stock had gained dramatically as major technology companies and cloud providers invested in AI infrastructure. Its graphics processors were well suited to the parallel calculations needed by machine-learning systems, while its CUDA software ecosystem made Nvidia hardware attractive to developers.
The “largest” label in this question means largest by market capitalization, not largest by revenue, workforce, physical assets, or annual profit. The lead was not permanent: market-cap rankings can change whenever share prices move. Nvidia’s stock has also undergone splits, which change the per-share price without changing the company’s overall value by themselves.