On 5 June 2024, Nvidia became the most valuable public company on Earth, its market capitalisation topping $3 trillion as its shares rose past those of Apple and Microsoft. It was a remarkable coronation for a company that had spent its early years selling graphics chips to gamers.
The cause was the artificial intelligence boom. Nvidia’s GPUs, the processors that power the training of large language models, had become the most sought-after industrial component on the planet, with customers from OpenAI to cloud providers queuing for supply. The company, led by founder Jensen Huang in his signature leather jacket, was selling every chip it could make and projecting profit margins most manufacturers could only dream of.
The milestone marked the moment the centre of gravity in technology shifted from the mobile era to the AI era, and it made Huang, briefly, one of the richest people in the world. But it also concentrated extraordinary power in a single supplier: almost every major AI system in the world ran on Nvidia silicon, a dependence that governments and rivals were already scrambling to break.