From $1 billion to $4 trillion valuation in 26 years: All about Nvidia's meteoric m-cap journey

Nvidia has created history, becoming the first company in the world to cross the $4 trillion market capitalization milestone. This came after the shares of the leading chip company jumped 2.5 percent to hit an all-time high of $164, benefiting from the ongoing surge in demand for artificial intelligence technology to transform businesses. Here are the key milestones hit by the company over the years in terms of market value.

1999 – $1 billion : Nvidia had launched its IPO in 1999, during which its market capitalization was less than $1 billion. The stock had listed at $12 per share. Later that year, the market capitalization of the then newly listed company crossed $1 billion. Microsoft then was the biggest public company, with a mcap of $348 crore. (Image: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang)

2007 –$10 billion : Jensen Huang’s company saw its market capitalisation jump to $10 billion in 2007. The year was a milestone year for the AI firm, during which it released the GeForce 8500 GT for the entry-level market, and the GeForce 8600 GT and 8600 GTS for the mid-range market. These GPUs saw strong interest in the gaming market. (Image source: Reuters)

2013 –$15 billion : Nvidia crossed the $15 billion mcap mark in 2013. It had already well established its lead among GPU-makers, especially for gaming PCs. The GeForce series was very popular among gamers, which was a solid and growing market. Its Quadro GPUs were widely used in industries like design, engineering, and video production, giving it steady business outside gaming.

2016 – $30 billion : Nvidia’s mcap crossed the $30-billion mark in 2016. This was driven by a rise in AI and deep learning, expansion of its data centres and strong gaming market. Additionally, the company had began to foray into the automotive space with its Drive PX platform, targeting advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. (Source: Reuters)

2018 –$100 billion : Nvidia rapidly transitioned from a growing GPU company to a key AI hardware leader, with expanding data center and gaming businesses and a crypto-driven demand surge, driving its market cap to $100 billion by 2018. Nvidia became the first chipmaker after Intel to reach such a high market valuation. The crypto craze, especially Ethereum mining, led to massive demand for Nvidia’s GPUs throughout 2017 and into early 2018. Strong sales in gaming laptops and desktops pushed revenue higher. (Image Source: Shutterstock)

2023 – $1 trillion : Nvidia became the first semiconductor company ever to hit $1 trillion market cap in 2023, outpacing tech giants Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon in market cap growth. The AI boom, especially around generative AI models (like large language models, image generation, and other deep learning applications), massively increased demand for Nvidia’s GPUs. It released its H100 Hopper GPU in 2022, which offered groundbreaking performance for AI workloads. The broader stock market was extremely bullish on AI-related stocks in 2023, with Nvidia being seen as the poster child of the AI revolution.

February 2024 - $2 trillion : Within just 9 months from the previous milestone, Nvidia’s mcap crossed $2 trillion in February 2024. Nvidia’s chips became mission-critical hardware for AI models like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and open-source alternatives. The company reported record breaking results the same year, and recorded a whopping $250 billion rise in mcap in a single day. CEO Jensen Huang referred to this period as “the beginning of a new industrial revolution” driven by accelerated computing and AI.

June 2024 - $3 trillion : Nvidia in June 2024 became the third company in the world to hit the $3 trillion-mcap mark, after Apple and Microsoft. Nvidia announced its next-generation AI chip architecture, Blackwell, which offered massive performance gains, better energy efficiency and native support for trillion-parameter models and inference at scale. It further continued to report stellar earnings. After a 1:10 stock split, the shares of the company surged, resulting in the significant surge in mcap. (Image source: Reuters)

July 2025 - $4 trillion : Nvidia shares jumped on Wednesday to make it the first public company in the world to reach $4 trillion in market valuation, solidifying its position as one of Wall Street's most-favoured stocks. The mcap of the company currently is close to the entire GDP of India, which was estimated to be $4.2 trillion by the IMF.