Nvidia is now worth more than Alphabet and Amazon. These 4 charts show the chipmaker's surge to a $1.8 trillion valuation.
- Nvidia passed Google owner Alphabet to become America's third most valuable company on Wednesday.
- AI has powered the chipmaker to massive stock-market gains since the start of 2023.
Nvidia is now worth more than its Big Tech rivals Alphabet and Amazon — as well as the entirety of China’s stock market.
The chipmaker’s market capitalization passed Amazon’s on Tuesday and Alphabet’s on Wednesday to stand at $1.83 trillion at Wednesday’s closing bell.
Nvidia has AI to thank for its stock surging more than 400% since the start of 2023.
It holds a dominant share of the market for the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power large language models like ChatGPT, so stock pickers have long heralded it as a potential winner from the massive explosion of interest in the tech.
Cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang, who founded Nvidia at a Silicon Valley Denny’s back in 1993, has also reaped the benefits, with his own personal fortune ballooning from $14 billion to $65 billion since the start of 2023, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
These four charts capture the semiconductor company’s meteoric AI-powered rise, which has made it the US’s third most valuable public company.
Nvidia's dominance is perhaps best captured by the extent to which its outperformed other Big Tech stocks — which have enjoyed an AI uplift of their own — since the start of last year.
The chipmaker has risen by 404% over that period, or in excess of four times the gains for rivals Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon.
The only mega-cap tech stock that's come close to matching its share-price gains for the period is Facebook parent Meta Platforms, which has rallied 279% partly due to Mark Zuckerberg's "Year of Efficiency" cost cuts.
Those stock-price gains have helped Nvidia to overtake the value of two mega-cap powerhouses, Alphabet and Amazon.
Tuesday marked the first time since 2002 that Nvidia has been worth more than Jeff Bezos' e-commerce giant, per data from Dow Jones.
The chipmaker is now America's third most-valuable company, behind only Microsoft and Apple — although it's about $1 trillion away from overtaking either.
At the end of 2023, some analysts were positioning Nvidia and Tesla as offering similar returns, after both racked up triple-digit gains and broke into the "Magnificent Seven" mega-cap tech group last year.
But while Nvidia has kicked off 2024 on another tear by surging more than 50%, Tesla has tumbled with investors worrying that demand for its EVs could soon slow.
Elon Musk's company is now worth $607 billion, or less than a third of the chipmaker's total valuation, in a reminder of how quickly things can change on Wall Street.
A final way to measure Nvidia's successes over the past 13 months is to compare it to the S&P 500, the US stock-market index of which it's now the third-largest member.
The index has risen by 30% since January 2023, thanks to excitement about AI and investors' expectation that the Federal Reserve will soon start cutting interest rates. Yet even that's proved to be no match for Nvidia's fourfold surge.