Nvidia on Wednesday became the first company in history to reach a $5 trillion market valuation, marking meteoric growth driven by the global artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
Shares of the leading AI chipmaker rose 3% to close at $207.04 on Wednesday, giving the company a market value of $5.03 trillion. The milestone highlights Nvidia’s rise from a video game graphics company into a force behind the AI revolution.
“Nvidia is at the epicenter,” CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this month on Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing.” “We’re the engine of the largest industrial revolution in human history. The last ones were steam engine, electricity, information technology, and now we’re creating artificial intelligence.”
The California-based company’s stock has surged twelve-fold since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, according to Reuters.
NVIDIA LAUNCHES MASSIVE AI PUSH WITH MAJOR PARTNERSHIPS ACROSS MULTIPLE INDUSTRIES
The record-setting valuation followed just a day after Huang unveiled a sweeping lineup of new AI initiatives and partnerships. The company announced Tuesday it had secured $500 billion in AI chip orders and would build seven supercomputers for the U.S. government, Reuters reported.
Nvidia also announced Tuesday it would pay $1 billion for a stake in Nokia, according to Reuters.
The $5 trillion valuation comes just three months after Nvidia topped $4 trillion, placing it far ahead of other tech giants. Only Apple and Microsoft have previously crossed the $4 trillion threshold.
Founded in 1993 by electrical engineers Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, Nvidia began as a modest startup hatched at a Denny’s in California’s Bay Area.
The founders initially targeted the gaming market as a way to generate revenue while tackling complex computing problems that could propel future growth.
A few years after its launch, Nvidia fell on challenging times after a setback in developing the graphics card for the Sega Dreamcast video game platform. It had little financial headroom and laid off over half its employees. An investment from Sega America CEO Shoichiro Irimajiri provided a lifeline that allowed it to refocus on a new line of graphics products.
NVIDIA TO INVEST UP TO $100B IN OPENAI
NVIDIA CEO SAYS HE’S IN TALKS WITH TRUMP ADMIN ABOUT SELLING BLACKWELL CHIP TO CHINA
In 1999, the company launched what it called the graphics processing unit (GPU), which helped revolutionize the computing industry. Nvidia went public that year, and its stock traded below $1 a share until early 2000.
In 2006, Nvidia developed the CUDA software platform and API that lets programmers get more computing power out of their GPUs. In the ensuing years, AI research teams began to use large amounts of GPUs to accelerate deep neural networks, which Nvidia refers to as the “big bang of modern AI.”
The application of GPUs accelerated deep learning by a factor of 50 in a three-year span by the end of 2015. At the end of that year, Nvidia’s stock was trading at $8.24 a share, and the company continued to develop more advanced GPUs.
Nvidia released its breakthrough RTX GPU in 2018, which propelled the company’s stock above $60 a share.
The next few years saw further advancements in GPUs and AI-enabled chips, which resulted in Nvidia contributing to the creation of the metaverse. Its stock was above $100 a share for all of 2022 and began to soar the following year amid the rise of AI.
Nvidia rolled out its Grace Hopper superchip in 2023, and by the end of the year its stock price was just shy of $500 a share.
Further advancements in 2024, including the announcement of Blackwell, the next-generation AI chip that served as a successor to Grace Hopper, sent its stock even higher.
In March of this year, Huang announced plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. supply chain over the next four years. A month later, he revealed plans to manufacture Nvidia’s AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S. for the first time.
“All of this started with President Trump wanting to reindustrialize the United States,” Huang said earlier this month on “The Sunday Briefing.” His tariffs were a pressing agent in making this possible at the speed that we’re doing, and now just shortly after less than a year, we’re now manufacturing the most advanced chips for AI here in the United States. This is just the beginning of it.”
CLICK HERE TO GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.
Fox News Digital’s David Rutz contributed to this report.
Read the full article here
