Out of the blue, during the summer of 2024, NVIDIA crossed juggernauts like Apple, Microsoft and Samsung, becoming the most valuable company in the world at $3.33 billion. While the corporation is back down to third place after a stock market correction, this is still a big deal. How did this seemingly random company skyrocket to this title?

Firstly, NVIDIA isn’t actually a ‘random company.’ In fact, the device you’re reading this article on is most likely functioning using one of their graphics cards. NVIDIA almost solely designs and sells graphics processing units, also known as GPUs. But we’re talking about a company that overtook Apple, which itself is the company that managed to sell their smartphones to nearly a fourth of the entire world’s population. So how, then, did NVIDIA get here?

Jensen Huang used to work as not even a waiter, but a waiter’s assistant in a Denny’s diner nearby where he lived. However, he quickly fell in love with computer science and its prospects and pursued a career in that field. Huang quickly landed a job working at AMD, one of the biggest microprocessor companies at the time. Inspired by his work at the company, he soon had an idea that would change the world forever. Huang held a meeting with two other AMD employees about the project that he’d envisioned, and thus NVIDIA was born. Ironically enough, the meeting took place at the same diner that Huang used to work at.

In 1999, NVIDIA launched the GeForce 256: the first ever chip marketed as a GPU. This chip could sit alongside a device’s central processing unit (CPU). Back then, CPUs could only perform one task at a time, therefore increasing the efforts required to complete even the smallest of functions. The GPU would take over the job of rendering graphics while working, allowing the CPU to work much more efficiently.

GPUs take difficult tasks that would be done all at once and break them down into smaller parts. These smaller tasks would then be tackled individually by smaller cores within the chip. Essentially, NVIDIA had just invented a key that unlocked new possibilities for technology never seen before.

This made the most significant impact in the field of gaming, as graphics are particularly important to virtual games. Using a graphics chip soon became standard for both console and computer gaming. 

Every few years since then, NVIDIA has come out with a new GPU significantly stronger and more efficient than the previous one. They’ve been so successful at making every chip a leap above the last that they’re now outselling their rival, AMD, by billions of dollars. 

Yet sailing on GPU sales alone didn’t bring NVIDIA this far. In 2006, NVIDIA released Compute Unified Device Architecture. CUDA was a software that allowed app developers to fully harness the power of graphics chips, even for jobs that didn’t involve graphics at all. Developers could take tasks that would be performed individually using the CPU and split them up to be performed using the thousands of smaller GPU cores within a graphics chip.

This was huge for NVIDIA. CUDA made NVIDIA graphics cards the standard for more than just gaming. They became the staple for video editing, programming and animating as well as much more. Developers and others became comfortable with the software as it was always improving and was extremely efficient due to being specifically designed for NVIDIA graphics devices. This is similar to how iOS is incredibly efficient on iPhones because it was made for them.

However, NVIDIA wasn’t done yet. There was another money-making avenue left for them to tap into: the ever-growing world of AI. Artificial intelligence works by being trained or taught. Huge amounts of data are processed and compiled for an AI, which then takes that data and learns from it to produce outputs of its own. 

Imagine teaching an AI how to play chess. After processing one game, the system makes moves based on the data it saw, and probably loses. One strategy isn’t enough to win every scenario. However, after analyzing millions of games, the AI now knows what to do in every situation possible. The AI has been trained to win chess.

Unimaginable amounts of processing has to be done to produce an AI of this caliber. This can take years. Done using CPUs, such an operation would be extremely slow. The CPUs would each analyze just one chunk of data at a time. On the other hand, with the use of NVIDIA graphics cards and CUDA, AI creation could be sped up. As artificial intelligence has exploded in popularity, NVIDIA has seen tremendous increases to their revenue as well. 

Whether it’s Tesla powering their self-driving feature or scientists trying to compile their research and data, a project needing massive amounts of processing almost always relies on NVIDIA. NVIDIA also powers Amazon and nearly 30 percent of all cloud-based internet in the world. The chances are that whenever you open a website, there is some product from NVIDIA along the pipeline that’s bringing the site to you.

Yet even with all of these accolades and achievements NVIDIA still wouldn’t be the most valuable company in the world. To accomplish that, the corporation did something called a ten-to-one stock split. 

Putting it simply, a single stock of the company was split into ten stocks for the same company. Each was now a tenth of the price of the original, but also worth a tenth of the amount. This made investing in the company much cheaper at a time that many people were looking to invest in AI. Thus, NVIDIA’s value skyrocketed.

Though the corporation was hit with a pretty harsh market correction, it’s still the third most valuable company in the world, only behind Microsoft and Apple. While NVIDIA may not be a household name, the impact it has made on technology as a whole will last forever.