There was a time when dreaming that a company would reach three trillion dollars in trading (three million million, to avoid confusion with the Anglo-Saxon trillions), was practically a chimera.
The first company to do so was Tim Cook’s Apple, which also progressed very quickly from one billion (August 2, 2018), to two billion (August 19, 2020) and even surpassing three billion (3 August). January 2022). However, the company’s price has remained stable around that value since then, while Satya Nadella’s Microsoft was able to continue growing in line with the generative algorithm and surpassed the apple brand on 12 January 2024.
The case of Microsoft and Nadella is especially interesting due to its historical evolution: while Bill Gates was able to lead a time of growth and increase in the company’s value while the personal computer established itself as the dominant environment, the rise and consolidation of Steve Ballmer, probably the worst manager in history, caused total stagnation, a constant loss of opportunities and an increasingly less relevant company. Satya Nadella had to arrive to right the company’s brand and put it back on the path to being a major player again, and eventually becoming the most valuable company on the market.
But what is truly interesting is the case of Nvidia: after many years of total stability or even losing value, the company has reached what is truly its moment: with artificial intelligence in full swing, Nvidia GPUs have managed to get nothing less than than 88% of the market, and after its last presentation of results, it has become much more valuable, to the point of surpassing Apple and taking second place. Now, an increasingly rich Jensen Huang awaits the arrival of a wave that promises to be even more important: the incorporation of his chips into robotics that will be increasingly present in all our activities.
Is Nvidia going to become the most valuable company in the world? No matter how much its competition steps up, the impression is that the company has no ceiling, riding a wave that does not seem to stop. Generative artificial intelligence is found in more and more applications, and it is precisely its low efficiency that means we need more and more processor power to achieve reasonably good results. Possibly we will discover new ways to make those algorithms more efficient, and it will be with Nvidia chips or other technology… but for the moment, Nvidia may feel, I get the impression, very comfortable with the trends for quite some time.
