by Whizy Kim
March 7, 2024
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.vox.com/money/2024/3/7/240 ... xplainer(Vox) Only four companies in the world are worth over $2 trillion. Apple, Microsoft, the oil company Saudi Aramco — and, as of 2024, Nvidia. It’s understandable if the name doesn’t ring a bell. The company doesn’t exactly make a shiny product attached to your hand all day, every day, as Apple does. Nvidia designs a chip hidden deep inside the complicated innards of a computer, a seemingly niche product more are relying on every day.
Rewind the clock back to 2019, and Nvidia’s market value was hovering around $100 billion. Its incredible speedrun to 20 times that already enviable size was really enabled by one thing — the AI craze. Nvidia is arguably the biggest winner in the AI industry. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which catapulted this obsession into the mainstream, is currently worth around $80 billion, and according to market research firm Grand View Research, the entire global AI market was worth a bit under $200 billion in 2023. Both are just a paltry fraction of Nvidia’s value. With all eyes on the company’s jaw-dropping evolution, the real question now is whether Nvidia can hold on to its lofty perch — but here’s how the company got to this level.
From games to crypto mining to AI
In 1993, long before uncanny AI-generated art and amusing AI chatbot convos took over our social media feeds, three Silicon Valley electrical engineers launched a startup that would focus on an exciting, fast-growing segment of personal computing: video games.
Nvidia was founded to design a specific kind of chip called a graphics card — also commonly called a GPU (graphics processing unit) — that enables the output of fancy 3D visuals on the computer screen. The better the graphics card, the more quickly high-quality visuals can be rendered, which is important for things like playing games and video editing. In the prospectus filed ahead of its initial public offering in 1999, Nvidia noted that its future success would depend on the continued growth of computer applications relying on 3D graphics. For most of Nvidia’s existence, game graphics were Nvidia’s raison d’etre.
