Rise of Nvidia: From humble beginnings to most valuable company in the world

Three decades after it was founded, chipmaker Nvidia has emerged as the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalisation of $3.34 trillion. The California-headquartered firm has dethroned Microsoft from the top position and pushed Apple to number 3. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Exxon Mobil, and General Electric are the only companies that have held this title since 2001, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Notably, Nvidia breached the $1 trillion-mark last year.

Nvidia is riding high on the artificial intelligence (AI) wave, especially after the advent of the generative AI-based tool ChatGPT in November 2022. On June 18, Nvidia’s shares closed at $135.58, growing more than three times its value in June last year. Nvidia is one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ US mega stocks, along with Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla and Meta.

Nvidia, with its chip series such as A100 and H100 catering to the burgeoning demand for AI processing, was catapulted to market dominance. Last year, the demand for H100 accelerators helped drive Nvidia’s sales up by more than 125%. At the annual Nvidia GTC event in March, founder and CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell platform. The company claims that it will allow enterprises to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25 times less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor.

In India, Nvidia has grown in tandem with the global parent and indeed has marginally surpassed it in terms of growth in the last 3-4 financial years, as per information pieced by TechCircle from VCCEdge, a data research platform. Further, in his visit to the country in September last year, Huang acknowledged India's potential, stating, “You have the data, you have the talent”, emphasising India’s potential to become one of the largest AI markets in the world. He also met with the country's premier, researchers, and tech leaders.

To be sure, Nvidia was founded in 1993 as the maker of graphic processing units (GPU), catering specifically to graphic-intensive applications like gaming. Beyond hardware, Nvidia is a well-respected name in the software domain with its CUDA platform used by developers for general-purpose computing on GPUs.