In a remarkable milestone, Nvidia $NVDA has overtaken Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, to become the third most valuable company in the world by market capitalization.
Nvidia Corp has claimed another milestone by overtaking Saudi Aramco in market value, making the chipmaker the world’s third-most valuable public company after Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The company ended Friday’s session at $2.06 trillion, closing above the $2 trillion mark for the first time. Only Apple $AAPL and Microsoft $MSFT are ahead of Nvidia, with market caps of $3 trillion respectively.
It took NVIDIA around nine months to attain the $2 trillion milestone from the $1 trillion market capitalization as of Jun 14, 2023. The share price momentum, which started at the beginning of 2023 with NVDA stock soaring 239% in the year, has continued in 2024. Year to date, shares of the company have surged 66.1%.
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Nvidia’s meteoric rise is driven by its dominance in the fields of artificial intelligence, gaming, cloud computing, and autonomous vehicles. The company’s flagship product, the GeForce RTX series of graphics cards, has been in high demand among gamers and content creators, as well as data centers and enterprises that use them for AI applications. Nvidia’s revenue for the fiscal year 2024 was $82 billion, up 48% from the previous year.
Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm, the leading designer of chips for smartphones and IoT devices, in 2020 also boosted its position in the semiconductor industry. The deal, which was valued at $40 billion, gave Nvidia access to Arm’s vast network of customers and partners, as well as its intellectual property and R&D capabilities. Nvidia has pledged to maintain Arm’s open licensing model and neutrality, while investing in its UK headquarters and creating a new AI research center there.
Nvidia’s CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, has been widely praised for his visionary leadership and innovation. He has been named one of the world’s best CEOs by Barron’s, Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review. He has also been recognized as one of the most influential people in technology by Time, Wired, and Bloomberg.
Nvidia’s success has also benefited its shareholders, employees, and communities. The company has returned over $20 billion to its shareholders through dividends and share buybacks since 2014. It has also created over 20,000 jobs worldwide and invested in education, research, and philanthropy through its Nvidia Foundation.
Nvidia is not only a leader in the field of artificial intelligence and graphics, but also a company that rewards its stakeholders for their trust and support. In the past seven years, Nvidia has distributed more than $20 billion to its shareholders in the form of dividends and stock repurchases, demonstrating its commitment to creating value and sharing success.
Nvidia also invests in its employees, offering competitive compensation, benefits, and opportunities for growth and development. Furthermore, Nvidia contributes to the social and environmental well-being of its communities, supporting various initiatives in education, health care, diversity, and sustainability.
What is Nvidia’s edge over other AI companies?
Nvidia is a leader in GPU computing, a supercharged form of computing that enables the most demanding applications in the world, such as 3D graphics, virtual reality, high performance computing, and artificial intelligence. Nvidia has evolved the GPU into a computer brain that can process massive amounts of data and perform complex calculations at unprecedented speed and efficiency.
Nvidia’s edge over other AI companies lies in its comprehensive and innovative platform that covers every aspect of AI development and deployment. Nvidia offers:
A full-stack platform for generative AI, which is a branch of AI that can create new content or data from existing ones, such as images, videos, text, or speech. Generative AI can be used for various applications, such as drug discovery, visual design, digital avatars, and more.
Nvidia’s platform includes generative model architectures, tools, and accelerated computing for training, customizing, optimizing, and deploying generative AI models. Nvidia has foundries for language, biology, visual design, and interactive avatars.
A suite of model-making services, pretrained models, cutting-edge frameworks, and APIs that simplify the development of custom enterprise-grade models with your own data and domain expertise. Nvidia offers state-of-the-art community- and NVIDIA-built foundation models, including Stable Diffusion, Llama 2, and Nemotron-3.
A scalable AI car platform that spans the entire range of autonomous driving. Nvidia DRIVE™ is used by 225 companies around the world to develop self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world .
An end-to-end, cloud-native software platform that accelerates data science pipelines and streamlines development and deployment of production-grade AI applications. Nvidia AI Enterprise is compatible with VMware vSphere and supports popular frameworks and tools such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, RAPIDS, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, and NVIDIA Jarvis.
A portfolio of strategic investments in emerging AI companies that are pushing the boundaries of innovation in various domains. Nvidia has stakes in Arm, SoundHound AI, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Nano-X Imaging, and TuSimple .
Nvidia is not only a provider of hardware and software for AI, but also a partner and enabler of AI-driven businesses and industries. By offering a comprehensive and innovative platform for generative AI, Nvidia empowers its customers to solve the world’s toughest challenges with creativity and intelligence.