The NVIDIA Revolution: Poised to Eclipse Apple in Market Valuation?

Whether it’s in gaming, mapping, entertainment or transportation, there are probably very few people who don’t use technologies that are made more efficient by rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence, whose programs are running on the tiny hardware created by NVIDIA. Nothing drives exponential growth like innovation, and very few companies have become more synonymous with innovation than NVIDIA, the world’s largest manufacturer of AI chips. Some of the fastest-growing industries in the world – including automotive, transportation, software and industrial – rely on its technologies. And now, NVIDIA is about to do something that few could have predicted just a decade ago: vault past Apple to become the world’s second-most valuable company. NVIDIA’s market capitalisation is now $2.8 trillion, second only to Apple’s $2.9 trillion. It is now hot on our tech giant’s heels. NVIDIA’s advancements suggest that we are about to see a reordering of the world’s leading tech giants.

The Rise of NVIDIA: How AI Became the Crown Jewel

NVIDIA’s rise is driven by its position as an early creator, and by its single-minded focus on AI chip technology, which is increasingly the core of every company in almost every industry. Already, many companies not only use AI and machine learning to perform tasks; they also use AI to create AI. As the services every business assumes will benefit from AI scales up, demand for powerful and energy-efficient AI chips will scale even faster. NVIDIA leads the world in designing these chips for not only the most challenging AI problems, including deep learning and autonomous vehicles, but for also scaling those chips to enable new levels of AI performance.

Bridging the Gap: NVIDIA's Market Cap in Perspective

Given NVIDIA has a market cap of around $2.8 trillion, which would put it as high as Apple – a company viewed by many for years as the bellwether of innovation in the world economy and a measure of market value, and a company Apple only inched past in 2020 – it is important to take note of the trend. In short, AI should matter to us all. It’s powering the reinvention of the global economy. And NVIDIA is fuelling the AI revolution.

NVIDIA and Apple: A Comparative Analysis

Apple, by contrast, has spread itself across a wide range of consumer electronics products, as well as software and services, while NVIDIA has strictly remained AI and computing focused. That strategy has served the company well, allowing it to benefit from the exponential growth of AI in nearly every sector of the economy. That the company has become a linchpin for chipping technology is a signal that AI technology has become an elite member of the tech pantheon and deserves the spotlight.

The Future of Tech: NVIDIA's Role in Shaping It

The prospect of NVIDIA overtaking Apple’s market capitalisation as the world’s most valuable company is not just a historical milestone: it’s the dawning of an era of technological innovation and market power. NVIDIA’s changing status is an indication of the growing recognition for companies that are the ‘stack’ as much as the ‘intellectual property’. It can be viewed as the next major ‘tech’ player beyond software and consumer electronics, which is in a position to corral the key technologies of tomorrow, in this case the key algorithms and infrastructure of artificial intelligence (AI). It can come as no surprise that NVIDIA continues to expand outside of specific AI chips into the broader domain of AI RD.

NVIDIA's Impact Beyond the Tech Industry

AI is a powerful force, but the real impact that NVIDIA has made extends far beyond the technological sphere. It has helped unleash other monumental developments – in healthcare, environmental science and autonomous technologies, to name just a few fields – to tackle some of humanity’s greatest challenges. Every day, NVIDIA’s creations get closer and closer to the sort of grand, life-changing AI that people have only ever read about before.

Looking Ahead: The Trail NVIDIA Is Blazing

As we watch to see whether NVIDIA’s market valuation breaks Apple’s record this very week, market valuations of global tech giants are shifting. Known for being a chip company that ‘got lucky’, NVIDIA is now on an AI conquering streak and is redefining what’s possible in the realm of computers. ‘Its influence is inescapable,’ was my assessment of NVIDIA’s ever-expanding role in the field of advanced computing in 2019 in the MIT Technology Review (‘NVIDIA’s Inescapable Influence’). That influence continues to grow.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA is a technology firms that produces chips that use a special type of artificial intelligence, and it’s rewriting the map of tech. In the 2020s, this company became the lynchpin of the tech world. Its innovations in artificial intelligence and, later, computing meant that it became not only an important leader in AI technology, but the most important player in the arc of technology over the next decade. Today, it is larger than many companies with similar market shares, and if NVIDIA surpasses Apple in market valuation, as some speculate, that transition would be a symbol of everything that’s changed and is changing in the tech sector. As a new tech giant with a lot of clout for something that you might not have heard of, the question of what NVIDIA does and why it matters is worth examining. Reshaping the world of technology En route to becoming perhaps the most influential tech company you have never heard of, NVIDIA was expanding at a dizzying pace. Its industry-specific chips have been deployed in some of the most fascinating and rapid technological transitions of the past decade. Everybody has a story to tell about NVIDIA’s artificial intelligence and the many ways it’s rewriting the map of power in the world.