In the era of technology, everyone knows certain companies in the industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple come to mind immediately on the topic of established technology companies. As of late, a new company has joined the mix: Nvidia. Its stock’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) surpassing of $750 recently marked a 17,000% increase in share price in the past decade and a $500 increase from a year before, according to Senior Reporter Daniel Saul from Forbes. What has contributed to its recent massive success?
Nvidia was established on April 5, 1993, by a trio of electrical engineers: Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. They have specialized in the semiconductor industry throughout their company’s history. According to their official website, Nvidia’s goal was to bring “3D graphics to the gaming and multimedia markets.” It is safe to say that the company has successfully established itself as the leader in the innovation of gaming GPUs (graphics processing unit). In the gaming industry, Nvidia is recognized for its production of top-tier GPUs, which are widely used in computer builds. Since its emergence, Nvidia has continued to outperform its main competitors (AMD and Intel) in the semiconductor industry.
Furthermore, in 2012, Nvidia began research into a project that flew mostly under the radar until the recent AI (Artificial Intelligence) boom. Finally, the company’s investment into AI technology is starting to pay off massively, through their DGX-2 Neural Network Trainer. The DGX-2 supercomputer continues to be viewed as the future of AI technology. Now, Nvidia labels itself as a “World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing.” Other AI companies such as OpenAI, IBM, and Microsoft have also greatly benefitted from the AI boom. Nevertheless, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has more ambitious plans for the future of AI, and he believes that Nvidia will be a large part of it.
“[My] guess is that every enterprise in the world, every software enterprise company that are deploying software in all the clouds and private clouds and [on-premises], will run on Nvidia AI Enterprise, especially obviously for our GPUs,” CEO Huang expressed to NASDAQ reporters. “[Nvidia’s generative AI] is a whole new way of doing computing…”
Lastly, the big news recently has been about Nvidia’s market value. On February 12, 2024, as reported by Derek Saul from Forbes, Nvidia surpassed technology giants Amazon and Alphabet (known as Google). A few weeks later, on February 26, 2024, Nvidia “became the first semiconductor company to reach a market cap of $2 trillion, after adding a record $277 billion in stock market value,” as reported by Richard Saintvillus on NASDAQ’s official website. This now means that Nvidia is the fourth largest publicly traded company in the world in terms of market value, after Microsoft ($3.1 trillion), Apple ($2.9 trillion), and Saudi Aramco ($2 trillion). Although great, Nvidia is not fixated on this news; the company is not planning to stop its exponential growth anytime soon.
“We’re off to a great start,” Huang said during Nvidia’s stunning Q4 earnings call. “We’re really just getting started.”
