NVIDIA hits $2 trillion market value driven by AI chip demand

The demand for AI chips is surging and the market value of NVIDIA is going along with it. NVIDIA is very well-known among the PC community for its graphics cards. In fact NVIDIA GPUs are probably what the company is most recognizable for. But in more recent years NVIDIA has been spearheading advancements in AI. Some of these AI technologies and features do make it into its graphics cards. DLSS technology for instance uses AI to generate frames in between frames as a way of boosting the frame rate within games. It’s neat, and anyone who has a compatible GPU surely appreciates it.

But it’s less the fact that it comes up with ways to boost gaming experiences, and more the fact companies are clamoring for NVIDIA’s AI chips to pump up their own AI-fueled endeavors that have caused NVIDIA’s value to skyrocket. In less than a year NVIDIA’s market value has basically doubled. In 2023 the company reached a market value of $1 trillion, the Wall Street Journal says (via the BBC). Now, the company is worth $2 trillion as last of Friday’s closing share prices. To put things into perspective, it took NVIDIA just eight months to reach its second trillion in value, yet it took the company over two decades to reach the first. It’s the kind of meteoric rise that has your jaw dropping to the floor out of sheer awe.

NVIDIA is the world’s fourth most valuable company thanks to its new market value

All of NVIDIA’s success has led it to become the world’s fourth most valuable company. And judging from the continued excitement that surrounds AI, it wouldn’t be surprising if NVIDIA’s value kept climbing. As of now, it sits behind Microsoft, Apple, and Saudi Aramco. It’s tough to say if it will ever end up surpassing either of those three. Even with AI’s popularity of late. But it doesn’t seem entirely out of the question.

Companies like OpenAI use thousands of NVIDIA GPUs to power ChatGPT, which processes requests from more than 100 million people. OpenAI’s own success, and its use of NVIDIA GPUs to get there, popularized NVIDIA’s chips for AI uses even further. At this point, it might be harder to find a company that doesn’t use NVIDIA chips to fuel their AI projects. Meta, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and even Microsoft have made use of NVIDIA’s chips.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang knows the power of what NVIDIA has, and more so, how important AI has become to the tech industry and beyond. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries, and nations,” Jensen said.

Dabbling in other forms of AI

It’s become clear that NVIDIA’s strongest and most lucrative efforts in AI have been through its GPUs powering the AI projects of other companies. But NVIDIA still finds time to put out some of its own AI technology. Earlier this month, the company released an RTX Chat bot for users of NVIDIA RTX GPUs. It functions completely offline and no data is stored in the cloud so your personal information stays safe. It’s not quite the revolution that its GPUs have become, but it’s still an otherwise useful tool for people who might have large hard drives with lots of files to sift through.

Then of course there’s the way it implements AI into its GPUs for game-related purposes. In short, NVIDIA has its hands in what seems like every corner of the AI market. Or close to it. And that’s turned out very well for the company.