Nvidia becomes the most valuable company in the world by 2024

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 of the major leaders had a positive start to the day, but a rise of 0.64% was not enough to push the stock higher. Apple weathered the green storm. Nvidia now ranks as the world's largest company by market capitalization, but can it defend its position? If so, for how long?

A deeper analysis of the actions of Nvidia shows that just a year ago, its market cap was around $1.1 trillion, giving us a 214% increase in share price in just 365 days. This growth is truly unprecedented, much of which can be attributed to the incursions of Nvidia in the AI market as the chipmaker's accelerators continue to fuel the hype train. Q2 2024 earnings show Nvidia's revenue grew by 1411Q3Q qoq, reaching 1411Q4Q10.3 billion in data centers, while in games was a modest 11% with $2.5 billion.

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

Those based on CDNA3 of AMD, such as the MI325X, and the upcoming CDNA4-based MI355X could shake things up a bit. For the time being, enterprises may still prefer Nvidia due to their 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 between 10,000 and 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.