Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company in June 2024, driven by demand for AI chips.
Nvidia overtook Microsoft and Apple in June 2024 as its market capitalization reached roughly $3.3 trillion. Investors were responding to extraordinary demand for the company’s graphics-processing units, or GPUs, which are widely used to train and run generative-artificial-intelligence systems.
Nvidia began as a graphics-chip designer for computer games, but its CUDA software platform helped make its hardware useful for scientific computing and machine learning. Its data-center business later became the company’s largest growth engine.
The ranking was temporary because market capitalization changes whenever share prices move. Nvidia’s rise nevertheless marked a major shift in the technology sector: a semiconductor designer, rather than a consumer-device or traditional software company, briefly occupied the top position.