Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable public company in June 2024 after leading the AI-chip boom.
Nvidia overtook Microsoft and Apple by market capitalization on June 18, 2024, as investors continued buying shares of the graphics-processor designer. The company’s chips were central to the data-center hardware used to train and run many artificial-intelligence systems.
Nvidia began as a graphics-chip company focused on computer games and visual computing. Its CUDA software platform and investment in parallel computing helped make its processors useful for scientific workloads, machine learning, and large-scale AI applications.
The leadership was temporary because market values change with share prices. Nvidia remained one of the world’s largest companies, but Apple and Microsoft also repeatedly moved into first place. The episode demonstrated how a company can rise rapidly when its technology becomes essential to a fast-growing industry.