NVIDIA becomes the world's most valuable company

Nvidia’s shares rose roughly 3.5% on 18 June 2024, pushing its market capitalisation past $3.33 trillion and above Microsoft’s roughly $3.32 trillion to make it, briefly, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world — having already overtaken Apple for second place two weeks earlier. The chipmaker’s stock had risen 175% year-to-date, against 19% for Microsoft over the same period, and had gone from a $1 trillion to a $3 trillion market capitalisation in about a year.

The rise reflected demand for Nvidia’s data-centre GPUs, which had become the primary hardware bottleneck for training and running large AI models: the company could not manufacture its H100 and successor chips as fast as customers wanted them, and its earnings had repeatedly beaten analyst expectations on the strength of that demand. Nvidia’s ascent made it, alongside Microsoft and Apple, one of only a handful of companies to reach a market capitalisation above $3 trillion, and unlike the other two its value depended almost entirely on a single product category tied to one industry’s build-out.

The position did not last: Nvidia’s stock pulled back in the following days while Microsoft’s and Apple’s held up better, and the title changed hands repeatedly among the three companies over the following two years as results and AI-related announcements moved each one’s valuation. The brief milestone nonetheless marked a symbolic point in the AI infrastructure boom: a company selling chips rather than a model or a consumer product had, if only for a matter of days, become worth more than any other public company on earth.