Nvidia, the US company specializing in high-performance GPU cards, has become the first ever company with a market capitalization of four trillion dollars. It is now the most valuable company in the world, ahead of Apple and Microsoft.
It’s a little over a year since the company overtook AAPL thanks to a spectacular rise in value that saw it go from being worth $2T to more than $3T in just four months …
Nvidia is best known for its high-end GPU chips used in gaming computers, and until the last few years its revenue was driven by a mix of gamers and graphics professionals.
However, GPUs are actually better than CPUs at some types of number-crunching, which is the reason they’ve been used for crypto mining among other things. Seeing this, and that machine-learning involves a similar type of calculation-intensive processing, the company made the smart decision to build servers optimized for this purpose.
As generative AI took off, the company found its AI servers in massive demand. That demand includes Apple, which is reportedly spending a billion dollars on them this year.
It remains to be seen whether Nvidia’s phenomenal valuation is sustainable, or whether it is instead in a bubble caused by demand temporarily exceeding supply. At the time of writing, its stock price was sitting at around $164, seeing its market cap dip back very marginally beneath $4T.
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