Nvidia became the first semiconductor company to rank as the world’s most valuable public company.
Nvidia reached the top position in June 2024, when its market capitalization briefly exceeded those of Microsoft and Apple. The company’s GPUs had become essential infrastructure for training and running many artificial-intelligence systems, creating demand far beyond its historic gaming market.
Nvidia’s products combine hardware with software tools, including the CUDA platform, which allows developers to use its processors for general-purpose parallel computing. This ecosystem helped establish the company as a central supplier to cloud providers, research organizations, and AI developers.
The record concerns a public-company ranking, not the size of the entire semiconductor industry. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Broadcom, and Intel are also major chip companies, but Nvidia’s 2024 stock-market surge gave it the highest market capitalization among all listed companies for a period. Rankings can change whenever share prices move.