Nvidia’s 2024 market-cap surge made it one of the world’s most valuable companies through demand for AI chips.
Nvidia designs graphics processing units, or GPUs, that are widely used for artificial intelligence training and inference. In 2024, investor enthusiasm over generative AI and data-center spending drove a major rise in Nvidia’s share price and market capitalization.
Nvidia’s CUDA software platform and its hardware ecosystem helped make its products central to many AI-computing systems. The company is sometimes confused with semiconductor manufacturers that fabricate chips, but Nvidia primarily designs chips and relies on manufacturing partners such as TSMC. Its ranking can change quickly because market capitalization moves with its share price.