NVIDIA Briefly Becomes the World's Most Valuable Company — The Day a GPU Vendor Reached the Summit

On 18 June 2024, NVIDIA's market capitalisation closed at about US$3.34 trillion—just ahead of Microsoft (≈US$3.32T) and Apple (≈US$3.29T). For the first time, the Taiwanese-American company best known to gamers was, on a closing basis, the most valuable listed company in the world.

The thirty-one-year-old chip vendor had climbed to the top of the S&P 500 just nineteen months after ChatGPT's debut.

From US$1 Trillion to US$3 Trillion in Eighteen Months

NVIDIA's market-cap trajectory was the financial-market expression of the generative-AI boom itself.

• November 2022 (ChatGPT launch): ≈US$360 billion
• May 2023: crossed US$1 trillion (first semiconductor firm to do so)
• February 2024: crossed US$2 trillion
• 18 June 2024: US$3.34 trillion, world number one
• October 2024: US$3.4 trillion
• Early January 2025 peak: ≈US$3.7 trillion

A ninefold rise in eighteen months. Almost no US large-cap has ever added market value at that velocity. The driver was demand for Hopper (H100/H200) and the just-announced Blackwell (B200): the four hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) earmarked more than US$200 billion of 2024 AI capex, the bulk of it routed to NVIDIA.

The 10-for-1 Stock Split

On 7 June 2024, NVIDIA executed a 10-for-1 stock split. Shares closed at about US$1,200 the prior day and opened the next session near US$120.

Mechanically a non-event for institutional holders, the split lowered psychological barriers for retail investors. Between the announcement (22 May) and execution, the stock rose sharply—setting up the 18 June ascent to number one.

Jensen Huang — The Industry's Symbol

As the market cap climbed, CEO Jensen Huang (黄仁勳) became the AI industry's most visible figurehead.

Born in Taiwan in 1963 and raised in the US, Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993. His signature black leather jacket, his hands-on customer visits—from sushi counters to Japanese car factories—and his "I am AI" oratory at GTC keynotes turned him into a near rock star. At Computex Taipei in June 2024 he was mobbed in the street; Taiwanese media nicknamed him "the god of semiconductors".

By stock value and compensation his personal net worth crossed US$100 billion in 2024. Alongside Sam Altman and Elon Musk, he became one of the three faces of the AI era, with regular standing audiences at the US Congress, the White House and foreign leaders' offices.

The Peak — November 2024 to January 2025

NVIDIA briefly ceded the top spot back to Microsoft and Apple after June, but reclaimed it on 14 October 2024 above US$3.4 trillion. Bloomberg estimates put the market cap near US$3.6 trillion in early November; the absolute peak, in early January 2025, was about US$3.7 trillion.

At that moment NVIDIA alone matched roughly the combined market value of all listed German companies—and approached half the total of the Nikkei 225 constituents.

The DeepSeek Shock — US$589 Billion Erased

On 27 January 2025, NVIDIA lost about US$589 billion of market cap in a single trading day—the largest one-day loss for any company in US stock-market history. Shares fell 16.97% to close at US$118.58.

The trigger was the Chinese reasoning model DeepSeek-R1, released the previous week: training cost about US$5.6 million, open-weights under MIT licence. The market read it as "training AI is much cheaper than assumed" and "frontier models will ship as open weights rather than closed APIs"—and concluded that future GPU demand would shrink.

Market cap fell to roughly US$2.9 trillion. Microsoft and Apple briefly retook the top spot.

What Was Happening

NVIDIA's run past US$3 trillion was not just one company's success story—it was the financial valuation of a phenomenon: the oligopoly of AI compute infrastructure.

Almost every AI developer, company and state procures training and inference GPUs from a single vendor. NVIDIA sits at the apex of a supply chain that includes ASML, TSMC and SK hynix. As long as the market judges that structural advantage to be near-permanent, US$3 trillion is supportable.

What the DeepSeek shock showed is the fragility of the underlying assumption. Algorithmic efficiency, open source, China's catch-up, US export controls—every one of these is a variable that could shrink future payments to NVIDIA.

The road from US$3 trillion to US$5 trillion would not be a straight line. June 18, 2024 will be remembered as the day a GPU vendor reached the summit—and January 27, 2025, six months later, will be remembered alongside it as the day the market understood how unstable that summit can be.