Nvidia first exceeded a $2 trillion market capitalization in the semiconductor industry in 2024.
Nvidia passed $2 trillion in February 2024 as investors responded to soaring demand for its artificial-intelligence accelerators and data-center systems. The company had previously been best known for graphics processors used in gaming, but its hardware and software became central to modern AI training and inference.
Nvidia designs chips and platforms, while much of its manufacturing is performed by external foundries, especially Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Its CUDA software ecosystem also helped make Nvidia hardware widely used by developers and researchers.
Market capitalization measures equity value, not the number of chips sold. Nvidia’s rapid ascent reflected expectations about future AI infrastructure spending, so its ranking changed quickly as share prices moved. The company later passed higher market-cap milestones, but $2 trillion marked a major semiconductor-industry threshold.