Nvidia Corp. was already the world’s most valuable semiconductor company. Now it’s the first computer chip company ever to reach a market cap of $3 trillion.
Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based company have surged about 147% this year, adding about $1.8 trillion as insatiable demand for its chips used to power artificial intelligence tasks skyrockets. On Wednesday, shares rose 5.2% to close at a record $1,224.40, pushing its market value to more than $3 trillion and overtaking Apple Inc.
The last time Nvidia was worth more than Apple was in 2002, five years before the first iPhone came out. At the time, both companies were worth less than $10 billion each.
Nvidia has shown no signs of slowing down or catching up to its rivals; the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang said the company plans to upgrade its so-called AI accelerators every year. Wednesday’s stock gain boosted its fortune by more than $5 billion to $107.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The rise of generative AI is a new industrial revolution, and Nvidia expects to play a major role as the technology moves into personal computers, Huang told attendees during a keynote address at National Taiwan University.
“We see this change already in the very early stages,” said Angelo Zino, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research.
After the CEO’s keynote, Zino said he appreciates the “improved visibility” and that he sees “greater momentum on the GPU/CPU/networking side, which will drive consensus estimates up.”
The company is likely to be the biggest beneficiary of a massive wave of AI spending, which has helped it land in a race to claim the title of world’s most valuable company. The chipmaker still trails Microsoft Corp. in market value, but with shares on the rocks, Wall Street sees it as only a matter of time before Nvidia catches up.
Apple has struggled this year, with shares of the tech giant weighed down by concerns about slowing demand for iPhones in China and a European Union fine. Shares of the company have only recently turned positive for 2024 as investor sentiment toward the iPhone maker slowly improves.
© 2024 Bloomberg LP
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
