Nvidia surpassed Alphabet in market capitalization on Wednesday, only a day after it overtook Amazon. Bloomberg is reporting that the chip maker’s stock is now worth $1.83 trillion, beating the Google owner’s $1.82 market cap by a hair. This makes Nvidia the world’s fourth most valuable company in the wake of the AI boom, after Microsoft ($3.04T), Apple ($2.84T) and Saudi Aramco. The company is currently making the H100 chip, which powers the majority of LLMs in use today, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the majority of AI projects from Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.
The world’s largest tech companies are involved in an AI chip arms race, with each of them hoping to create their own GPU chip to topple Nvidia’s virtual monopoly. Ironically, as Bloomberg notes, Nvidia’s top sales of AI chips come from those same companies. The Santa Clara-based firm is close to releasing a superior AI chip, the H200, which has more memory capacity and bandwidth than its predecessor. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Nvidia has invested $30 billion into a unit devoted to helping other companies make their own custom AI chips. Meaning, even if companies opt to build their own AI chips, Nvidia could get a piece of the action.
Meanwhile, direct competitors like Intel and AMD are working on their own powerful chips that could rival the H200.
