Nvidia Becomes Most Valuable Public Company, Topping Microsoft

Move over, Microsoft and Apple. The stock market has a new king.

On Tuesday, Nvidia leapfrogged two of tech’s most storied names to become the world’s most valuable public company, according to data from S&P Global. Its ascent has been powered by the boom in generative artificial intelligence and surging demand for the company’s chips — known as graphics processing units, or GPUs — which have made it possible to create A.I. systems.

Nvidia’s rise is among the fastest in market history. Just two years ago, the company’s market valuation was a little over $400 billion. Now, in the span of a year, it has gone from $1 trillion to more than $3 trillion.

On Tuesday, Nvidia’s share price rose 3.6 percent, lifting its value to $3.34 trillion. Microsoft and Apple both fell, ending the day trailing the Silicon Valley chip maker.

Nvidia’s ascent is a testament to how much artificial intelligence has upended the world’s biggest companies. The rise of the powerful technology first elevated Microsoft to the biggest market capitalization in January, dethroning Apple, before pushing Nvidia to take the crown. Last week, Apple said it, too, was getting into the A.I. game and will add the technology to its products, including the iPhone, this fall.

Years before other big chip companies, Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, bet that GPUs would be essential to building artificial intelligence, and he tailored his company to accommodate what he believed would be tech’s next big boom.

His big bet is paying off. By some measurements, Nvidia controls more than 80 percent of the market for the chips used in A.I. systems. Nvidia’s biggest customers regularly jockey for orders for chips to run computers in their giant data centers, and are building their own A.I. chips so they are not so dependent on one supplier.