The AI craze is in full swing as Nvidia is now the world’s largest company by market capitalisation. With a market cap of 1T4T3.52 trillion, Nvidia has effectively overtaken Apple for the second time this year.

This news follows gains in the stock market, with Nvidia shares up 2.72% this morning. All the major leaders had a positive start to the day, but a 0.64% surge was not enough for Apple to weather the green storm. Nvidia now ranks as the world’s largest company by market capitalization, but will it be able to defend its position? If so, for how long?

A deeper dive into Nvidia’s stock shows that just a year ago, its market cap was hovering around $1.1 trillion, giving us a $2.1 trillion increase in share price in just 365 days. This growth is truly unprecedented, much of which can be attributed to Nvidia’s forays into the AI market as the chipmaker’s accelerators continue to fuel the hype train. Earnings for Q2 2024 show that Nvidia’s revenue grew by $1.4 trillion QoQ, reaching $1.0 trillion in datacenters, while in gaming it was a modest $1.1 trillion at $2.5 trillion.

(Image credit: Companiesmarketcap)

With virtually every company planning to grab a piece of the AI pie, they still require chips specifically designed for AI training and inference. Nvidia’s latest Blackwell-based B100 and B200 GPUs are reportedly out of stock for the next 12 months. AI-focused companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and more are all in an arms race to get their hands on Nvidia’s latest chips.

AMD’s CDNA3-based GPUs, such as the MI325X, and the upcoming CDNA4-based MI355X, could shake things up a bit. For the time being, enterprises might still prefer Nvidia due to its better software stack; however, more competition is beneficial even for multi-trillion-dollar conglomerates. The question comes down to large-scale production, as data centers and supercomputers require 10,000 to 100,000 GPUs, so it ultimately depends on whether any of the companies can meet the required demand within the given time.

It’s been a busy couple of years not just for Nvidia, but also for its CEO, Jensen Huang, who is about to receive an honorary doctorate in engineering. Financially, consumer GPUs seem to be an afterthought for Nvidia, though leaks suggest Nvidia is eyeing a January 2025 reveal for the highly-anticipated RTX 50 series.