NVIDIA becomes the most valuable company in the world
NVIDIA's share closed at 135.58 dollars, 3.5 per cent up on the day before. By the press's count its market value reached 3.34 trillion dollars, passing Microsoft to make it the most valuable public company in the world.
Why it matters
Money named the bottleneck of the field for the first time: not models and not data, but the chips they are computed on.
From 30 November 2022, the day ChatGPT came out, the share price, adjusted for the ten-for-one split, rose from 16.92 to 135.58 dollars, eightfold. The revenue came not from games but from data centres: in the quarter to 28 April 2024 NVIDIA took 22.6 billion dollars from data centres and 2.6 billion from gaming. CNBC put NVIDIA's share of the data-centre AI chip market at 80 per cent. That made the company the bottleneck of the whole industry and turned access to compute into a geopolitical question, with export restrictions on these chips becoming an instrument of policy in their own right. The closing price is the exchange's; the market value and the passing of Microsoft are the press's computation, because the share count is in SEC filings not read here.