Nvidia started as a humble graphics card maker. Now it’s riding the tech industry’s AI obsession to absurd new heights. The company added $329 billion to its market cap on Wall Street today after a record-breaking day of stock trading, Bloomberg reports.
Most people know Nvidia as the manufacturer of the chip that powers their Android phones, Nintendo Switches, and top-end PC gaming rigs. It got its first big break designing the GPU for Microsoft’s original Xbox, and helped Sony design the graphics processor for the PlayStation 3. For years it was the company that held up big hunks metal with plastic fans on stage to woo gamers with upgrades they couldn’t afford. Now it’s quickly become something else entirely.
Nvidia was trading below $15 a share at the start of 2023. Less than two years later it’s over $100. What changed? Microsoft and others are gobbling up GPUs to power their AI ambitions. It seemed like the fever might have broken amid a renewed wave of skepticism around what generative AI and machine learning will actually be useful for, but then Microsoft announced it’s going to continue pouring billions into server farms for AI computing and Nvidia’s stock shot up more than most companies are worth in less than eight hours. Let’s remember some previous high scores:
$329 billion is more than Netflix, Coca-Cola, and Bank of America. It’s the value of eight Electronic Arts and 12 Take-Twos, whose subsidiary Rockstar Games publishes Grand Theft Auto VI next year. Nvidia isn’t worth more than ever—it peaked last month at over $3 trillion—but this single-day swing points to how completely untethered the company has become from its recent history or the current marketplace reality in which OpenAI is reportedly losing billions. With Meta pivoting from VR to the AI chip arms race and others chasing desperately to catch up, Nvidia has quickly become the center of the tech and financial universe.
‘These violent delights have violent ends.” We might just be witnessing the first of many transformations before Nvidia’s final form. Maybe it will be the first true megacorp in a future cyberpunk dystopia, or maybe some of the plates stop spinning and start breaking and the company goes back to releasing hard-to-find Gundam-branded graphics cards for $4,000 gaming rigs that let you play Ghost of Tsushima in 4K at 120fps. It’s never a good sign when the numbers get so insane that they stop meaning anything.