Nvidia’s market capitalization surged during the artificial-intelligence boom because it designs leading data-center GPUs.
Nvidia develops graphics processing units, or GPUs, that can perform many calculations in parallel. Those capabilities made its hardware highly useful for training and running artificial-intelligence models, especially in large data centers.
The company was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It first became widely known for graphics chips used in personal computers and video games, but it later expanded into professional visualization, automotive computing, and accelerated data-center systems.
Nvidia’s market-cap growth is sometimes attributed only to gaming, but data-center demand became a central part of its investment story. Its CUDA software platform also helped create an ecosystem around Nvidia hardware. Market capitalization can rise before all expected future sales appear in financial statements, because share prices incorporate investor expectations.