NVIDIA held the title of the world’s most valuable company after overtaking Microsoft in June 2024.
NVIDIA’s market capitalization surged as investors anticipated enormous demand for its graphics-processing units, which are used to train and run artificial-intelligence systems. On June 18, 2024, NVIDIA’s valuation briefly exceeded those of Microsoft and Apple, making it the highest-valued publicly traded company at that point.
The company began in 1993 as a graphics-chip designer and became especially influential in accelerated computing. Its CUDA software platform helped make NVIDIA hardware useful for machine-learning workloads, strengthening the company’s position during the generative-AI boom.
Market-cap leadership can change quickly because it depends on share prices and share counts. NVIDIA’s ranking later fluctuated as other mega-cap companies rose, but its June 2024 takeover was a major event in the history of technology-company valuations.