Nvidia becomes Wall Street’s third most valuable company: A timeline of AI chipmaker's soaring valuations

In 2017, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, was worth $2.7 billion. In 2023, he was worth $21.1 billion

Nvidia briefly surpassed Google parent Alphabet as the third most valuable US company on Wednesday as the AI chipmaker's market valuation kept hitting new highs due to multiple tailwinds.

Nvidia’s stock market value hit a whopping $1.83 trillion during the trading session, just above Alphabet’s $1.81 trillion market capitalisation, due to artifical intelligency hype increasing demand for their chips.

The Santa Clara, California company’s stock was last up 1.5%, putting its value at $1.807 trillion, while Alphabet’s stock was flat, leaving it with a marginally higher value of $1.810 trillion.

Post implosion in usage of ChatGPT, Nvidia has been a top beneficiary of technology companies’ race to build AI into their products and services, and the latest gain in its stock comes a day after it ended a session with a market capitalisation above Amazon’s for the first time in two decades.

Nvidia controls about 80% of the high-end AI chip market, a position that has sent its stock up 47% this year after more than tripling in 2023. Customers face shortages of Nvidia’s top-of-the line components while AI developers face months-long waiting lists to use its processors through cloud-computing providers.

In May 2023, Nvidia became the ninth company to hit $1 trillion milestone. It took Nvidia 30 years to reach the milestone as compared to 17 years, 18 years and 21 years taken by Facebook, Tesla and Google, respectively.

In 2004, the market capitalistaion of Intel, Nvidia's biggest competitor, was $200 billion as against Nvidia's $4-billion valuation. In 2024, Nvidia's m-cap was $1.8 trillion as against Intel's $185-billion valuation.

In 2017, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, was worth $2.7 billion. In 2023, he was worth $21.1 billion.

Right now, with NVIDIA's stock fast approaching $2 trillion-mark, he is worth $65.3 billion.

Nvidia's m-cap has hit new highs ever since a report said, earlier this month, that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors, including the UAE, to raise funds for a tech initiative to boost the world's chip-building capacity and expand its ability to power AI. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Since January 1, Nvidia has added $650 billion to its market cap, which is more than entire market cap of Tesla. Since October 2022, Nvidia has added a massive $1.5 trillion to its market cap.

Nvidia now controls over 70% of global AI chip production.

Nvidia’s quarterly report next Wednesday will be one of Wall Street’s most closely watched events of the week. Analysts expect another blowout quarter and outlook, and anything less could deflate Wall Street’s AI rally, some investors warn.