Nvidia’s shares rose sharply in 2024 as the company became central to the boom in generative-AI computing.
Nvidia designs graphics-processing units, or GPUs, that are widely used to train and run artificial-intelligence models. In 2024, demand from major cloud providers and AI developers drove exceptional investor attention to Nvidia’s data-center business, pushing its market capitalization into the ranks of the world’s largest companies.
The company’s influence comes from both hardware and software. Its CUDA platform allows developers to use Nvidia GPUs for parallel computing, and a broad ecosystem of tools supports machine-learning workloads. This combination helped Nvidia become a key supplier for large-scale AI infrastructure rather than merely a maker of gaming graphics cards.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. Its rising market value did not mean that every AI company used Nvidia exclusively, nor did it measure the company’s physical assets. It represented investors’ changing expectations about future profits from accelerated computing and artificial intelligence.