Tech big Nvidia turned the primary firm in company historical past to briefly surpass a $5 trillion valuation in October because of its position within the AI growth.
Insatiable demand from international firms for its AI chips has cemented its dominance with an 81% market share by income for information heart chips, in keeping with analysis from the Worldwide Information Company. That, in flip, has propelled the explosive development of Nvidia’s inventory (NVDA), which has surged 12-fold because the groundbreaking launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot in November 2022.
Nvidia’s gross sales and earnings had been up greater than 60% within the October quarter in comparison with the earlier 12 months, hovering previous Wall Road’s expectations. Final month, it unveiled the subsequent era Vera Rubin chip, extensively seen as the corporate’s subsequent development driver. Nvidia now expects its complete gross sales to hit new information in 2026, projecting round $500 billion in income.
Nonetheless, the tech big is going through a rising set of challenges, from intensifying competitors to lingering considerations of an AI bubble and relentless strain to reveal development after a number of explosive quarters.
Right here’s a take a look at Nvidia’s success in 4 graphics:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang based the corporate in 1993 with a deal with chips often known as graphics processing models for video video games. Its GPUs had been later discovered to be properly suited to AI coaching.
However the firm’s breakout second didn’t come till after ChatGPT’s arrival in late 2022, extensively thought of to be the kickoff to at present’s AI growth.
Shares of Nvidia climbed at steep tempo, making the AI big the ninth firm on this planet to succeed in a $1 trillion valuation in 2023, three many years after its institution. Whereas the AI big has shed some worth in latest months, it stays the world’s most precious firm.
However Nvidia’s secret sauce is extra than simply GPUs. It additionally presents full server racks full of different kinds of chips which are vital to AI workloads and software program that permits builders to tailor their code to benefit from its chips. Now it’s attempting to put the muse for information facilities of the longer term, which it calls “AI factories.” The corporate can be attempting to place itself on the heart of rising applied sciences like robots, quantum computer systems and self-driving vehicles. It introduced partnerships with Uber to construct self-driving vehicles and with the US Division of Power to develop quantum supercomputers with its AI chips final 12 months.
For a lot of 2025, the corporate, like different main tech corporations, raced to strike offers and pour in funding. In April, Nvidia stated it plans to construct $500 billions of AI infrastructure with its companions within the US. In September, Nvidia invested $5 billion in Intel to develop customized information facilities. Days later, Nvidia introduced a strategic partnership with OpenAI, below which it should make investments as much as $100 billion within the latter in increasing AI information heart capability constructed round its chips. Regardless of reviews of latest friction between the 2 AI giants the executives of each firms have since publicly stated they continue to be dedicated to the deal.
As Nvidia’s chips have grow to be the spine of the worldwide AI trade, the corporate’s partnerships have expanded properly past North America. In Europe, Nvidia is working with telecoms and governments in France, Germany, Italy and the UK to deploy sovereign AI infrastructure and construct AI know-how facilities. In South Korea, it’s collaborating with authorities and companies to deploy over 26,000 chips.
Nevertheless, fears of a bubble have clouded the outlook for AI, a fear Huang has repeatedly brushed apart. On the similar time, Nvidia is going through rising strain from rivals like AMD and prospects growing their very own chips to cut back reliance on the trade’s dominant provider.
In China, as soon as a significant marketplace for Nvidia, US tech controls have restricted exports of its cutting-edge chips, considerably impacting gross sales on this planet’s second largest economic system. Though Huang has managed to persuade President Donald Trump to reverse some restrictions and permit gross sales of its second strongest chips, Beijing has but to substantiate it should permit its firms to buy them.
These considerations haven’t stopped Nvidia and Huang. The corporate’s new Rubin chips, presently in manufacturing, will arrive within the second half of 2026. Main cloud suppliers, together with Microsoft, Amazon Net Companies, Google Cloud and CoreWeave, might be among the many first to deploy it.
In his effort to diversify Nvidia’s enterprise, Huang additionally rolled out new AI fashions for autonomous driving and robotics – deepening his push for the corporate to grow to be a significant participant in these fields.
“Our imaginative and prescient is that, sometime, each single automobile, each single truck might be autonomous,” he stated.
