Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, must be celebrating this milestone with champagne in his office, as no one could have imagined 30 years ago that a graphics card company could be worth more than companies like Google or Amazon.
Nvidia surpassed Alphabet (Google’s parent company) in market capitalization on Wednesday, just one day after surpassing Amazon. Yes, this means that if someone wants to buy Nvidia, they would have to pay more money than to buy Amazon or Google.
Nvidia becomes the 4th most valuable company in the world
Bloomberg reports that the chip manufacturer’s shares are now worth $1.83 trillion, just surpassing the $1.82 trillion market capitalization of Google’s owner.
This makes Nvidia the fourth most valuable company in the world after the AI boom, behind Microsoft ($3.04 trillion), Apple ($2.84 trillion), and Saudi Aramco.
The company currently manufactures the H100 chip, which powers most of the LLMs in use today, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and most of Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon’s AI projects.
The world’s largest technology companies are engaged in an arms race for the AI chip, and each of them hopes to create their own GPU chip to overthrow Nvidia’s virtual monopoly.
Ironically, as Bloomberg points out, Nvidia’s highest sales of AI chips come from those same companies. The Santa Clara-based company is about to launch a superior AI chip, the H200, which has more memory capacity and bandwidth than its predecessor.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Nvidia has invested $30 billion in a unit dedicated to helping other companies manufacture their own custom AI chips. This means that even if companies choose to create their own AI chips, Nvidia could still benefit.
Meanwhile, direct competitors like Intel and AMD are working on their own powerful chips that could rival the H200.
