Nvidia spent three decades building a business worth $1 trillion. It spent two years turning itself into a $4 trillion company.
On Thursday, the world’s leading provider of computer chips for artificial intelligence became the first public company to be worth $4 trillion, after its stock ended the day trading just above $164 a share. It achieved the milestone before an array of better-known tech heavyweights, including Apple and Microsoft.
Nvidia’s rise is among the fastest in Wall Street history, and it is a testament to investors’ belief that artificial intelligence will deliver an economic transformation that rivals the Industrial Revolution’s.
More than any other company, Nvidia jump-started the A.I. frenzy. Jensen Huang, the company’s chief executive, bet a decade ago that chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, would make it possible to build artificial intelligence systems. He poured billions of dollars into software for A.I. developers.
The bet paid off in 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, igniting a frenzied race to develop A.I. systems and products. In recent months, tech titans have showered A.I. experts with $100 million checks and have set out to spend tens of billions of dollars on data centers that consume more electricity than a million homes.
Nvidia has been the backbone of that build out. It controls more than 80 percent of the market for the chips used for building A.I. systems. Its biggest customers — and some of the world’s richest men — regularly jockey for the company’s chips to run computers in their data centers.
Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon expect to spend a combined $320 billion this year on infrastructure, with a good part of that flowing to Nvidia. The demand is so great that Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, last year recalled a sushi dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., where he and Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, begged Mr. Huang for more chips.
“Please take our money. Please take our money,” Mr. Ellison recounted saying. “We need you to take more of our money. Please.”
Nvidia’s investors have watched its profits multiply while its annual net income jumped from $4.4 billion in its 2023 fiscal year to $73.88 billion in its 2025 fiscal year. The company’s market value enjoyed a similarly meteoric rise, surging from $330 billion in the fall of 2022 before ChatGPT’s release to $3.3 trillion last fall.
Nvidia’s rise is reminiscent of dot-com era titans like Cisco and Juniper Networks, which built the equipment that ran communications networks for the internet. Cisco’s shares increased more than a thousandfold between its initial public offering in 1990 and 2000, when it briefly became the world’s most valuable company.
But Mark Lipacis, a semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI, said Nvidia would have more staying power than those companies. He said Nvidia is to A.I. what Apple has been to smartphones: the dominant player at the forefront of a new computing era. He believes Nvidia could eventually account for 16 percent of the S&P 500, more than double Apple at its peak.
“History tells us that these are 20-year eras,” Mr. Lipacis said. “For Nvidia, the battle is already won.”
The company’s success has made Mr. Huang, 62, a celebrity in the tech world. Over the past two years, more than 15,000 people have filled a hockey arena in San Jose, Calif., to hear him talk about how he sees the future of A.I. unfolding.
In the process, he has also become one of the world’s richest men. His 3.5 percent stake in Nvidia is worth more than $135.4 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ, a market research provider.
Keeping the $4 trillion valuation is far from guaranteed for the company. There are still pockets of skepticism across Wall Street and Silicon Valley about the potential for artificial intelligence. There are questions about whether businesses will see sufficient return on a technology that is expected to cost $1 trillion to develop.
Nvidia also faces rising competition. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are all developing in-house A.I. chips that reduce their need for Nvidia. And the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, has been making inroads with its own A.I. products.
Nvidia’s dominance has given rise to government scrutiny. The Justice Department has been investigating Nvidia’s sales practices and acquisitions. In the European Union, Britain, China and South Korea, regulators are looking at how it allocates supplies of its chips and structures its sales of software and hardware.
The company can also be upended by geopolitical forces. Early this year, its shares fell 17 percent and it lost $600 billion in market value on a single day after the Chinese company DeepSeek claimed it could train a cutting-edge A.I. system with a tiny fraction of the Nvidia chips U.S. companies were using. Investors’ fears proved to be overblown, and Nvidia recovered. But the breakthrough showed the volatility that comes with being an A.I. bellwether.
“This market is so huge that there are going to be multiple winners,” said Daniel Newman, the chief executive of Futurum Group, a tech research firm. “Nvidia’s staying power will come down to execution.”
Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis.
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