Nvidia overtook Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company on June 18, 2024.
The change followed a dramatic rise in Nvidia’s share price as businesses invested heavily in artificial-intelligence computing. Nvidia designs graphics processing units and related systems that are widely used to train and operate large AI models.
Its market capitalization briefly reached roughly US$3.34 trillion on that date. Microsoft and Apple traded close behind, so the ranking was sensitive to ordinary daily movements in their share prices.
Nvidia’s ascent illustrated how market capitalization reflects investor expectations about future earnings as well as present business performance. It also marked a major shift in the technology-market hierarchy: a semiconductor designer became the most valuable publicly traded company, rather than a software, internet, or consumer-electronics giant.