Nvidia Dethrones Microsoft and Apple to Become World's Most Valuable Company Amid AI Boom

Chipmaker Nvidia, which has grown more than nine-fold since the end of 2022, is outperforming Microsoft and Apple in terms of profits as a stock market surge pushed its valuation above $3.3 trillion.

Nvidia, which has long been known among niche gaming for its graphics chips, is now the most valuable public company in the world. Shares of the chipmaker rose 3.6% on Tuesday, raising the company's market capitalisation to $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft, which is now valued at $3.32 trillion. Earlier this month, Nvidia reached $3 trillion for the first time, surpassing Apple.

Nvidia has about 80% of the market for artificial intelligence chips used in data centres, a business that is expanding as OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and others have rushed to snap up the processors needed to build artificial intelligence models and run increasingly large workloads.

In the last quarter, Nvidia's data centre revenue rose 427% year-on-year to $22.6 billion, accounting for about 86% of the chipmaker's total sales.

Nvidia's shares are up more than 170% this year and rose even further after the company's first-quarter earnings report in May. Since the end of 2022, the stock has risen more than ninefold, and this growth has coincided with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence.

Founded in 1991, Nvidia spent its first few decades primarily as a hardware company that sold chips for gamers to run 3D games. It also tried to produce chips for cryptocurrency mining and cloud gaming subscriptions.