Nvidia, the Californian tech company known for its PC GPUs, has seen a surge in market value, briefly overtaking Apple as the world’s most valuable company.
And the reason isn’t video games. It’s AI.
On Friday last week Nvidia’s stock market value reached $3.53 trillion, overtaking Apple’s $3.52tn, as reported by Reuters based on LSEG data. At the end of that day, Apple remained on top at $3.52tn, but at $3.47tn Nvidia saw an overall market value increase of 0.8 percent.
LSEG data shows Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft are in a three horse race as the world’s most valuable companies. Nvidia briefly hit the top spot back in June, but was overtaken by both Microsoft and Apple shortly after.
By comparison on Friday, Microsoft’s market value was $3.18 trillion.
The reason for Nvidia’s increased market value is it’s become the dominant supplier of processors used in AI computing, which requires huge amounts of processing power.
Additionally, earlier this month, Nvidia unveiled a new AI model that reportedly outperforms the likes of Chat GPT maker OpenAI (thanks VentureBeat). It marks a shift for the company as it enhances its AI capabilities alongside its typical GPU offering.
“More companies are now embracing artificial intelligence in their everyday tasks and demand remains strong for Nvidia chips,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, told Reuters.
“It is certainly in a sweet spot and so long as we avoid a big economic downturn in the United States, there is a feeling that companies will continue to invest heavily in AI capabilities, creating a healthy tailwind for Nvidia.”
It seems graphics processing and AI could go hand in hand, too. Last month, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang discussed how AI could be used to advance graphical capabilities. “We can’t do computer graphics anymore without artificial intelligence,” he said. “We compute one pixel, we infer the other 32. I mean, it’s incredible. And so we hallucinate, if you will, the other 32, and it looks temporally stable, it looks photorealistic, and the image quality is incredible, the performance is incredible.”
Nvidia will be supplying parts for Nintendo’s forthcoming Switch 2 console, as Digital Foundry explored last year.
The company’s next round of top of the range graphics cards are also expected to be announced soon.
