He incessant Nvidia rally has boosted the semiconductor giant’s market capitalization over its mega-cap tech peers, helping it take the title of the most valuable company in the world as the wave of artificial intelligence continues.
Shares rose as much as 4 percent to around $3.3 trillion this Tuesday, June 18, catapulting them above Microsoft and Apple. The main stocks have competed throughout the month for the pole positionand Nvidia outperformed its big-tech peers.
At the beginning of the month, Nvidia surpassed Apple by value market for the first time since 2002, and the two went back and forth in the rankings in recent days. Last week, Apple also overtook Microsoft to briefly take the top spot, now taken away by Nvidia.
The ranking is another reminder that AI is the main focus of many investors. Nvidia is seen as the largest and first beneficiary of the technology, as it dominates the market with its highly sought-after chips that help power data centers that execute complex computing tasks required by AI applications. Demand for its H100 accelerators is surging and helped boost the chipmaker’s sales by more than 125 percent last year.
Microsoft, for its part, is also seen as an early winner from AI given its investment and partnership with OpenAI, which created ChatGPT. And this week, Apple shares rallied after the iPhone maker finally revealed its plan to use the technology, finally appeasing investors.
“We believe that over the next year the race to the $4 trillion market cap in technology will be on.” the center of attention between Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft”Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note.
Nvidia rises like foam: This is how the fortune of its owner has grown
The growing Nvidia stock price has made co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang one of the richest people in the world. His net worth has increased more than $70 billion since the beginning of the year to $115 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s the biggest profit among his billionaire peers.
Investors, along with Huang, argue that Nvidia is more than a chipmaker.
“They don’t just sell chips, they sell systems,” Michael Lippert, vice president and portfolio manager at Baron Capital Inc., said in an interview, pointing to the company’s proprietary software and development ecosystem.
He Nvidia’s rapid rise to the top has broken records, as the company is one of the few companies that has demonstrated significant revenue growth thanks to AI. As of the latest close, the stock is up more than 160 percent in 2024, adding more than $2 trillion to its market capitalization.
“Nvidia GPU chips are essentially the new gold or oil in the technology sector as more businesses and consumers quickly head down this path with the Fourth Industrial Revolution underway,” Ives said.
