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Nvidia
This story is part of our coverage of Computex, the world’s biggest computing conference.

Nvidia has now become the second most valuable company in the US, trailing only Microsoft by around $140 billion (a relatively small amount considering the scale). The company has reached an all-time high of surpassing the $3 trillion mark, overtaking Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and most notably, Apple.

Just last year at this same time, we reported on Nvidia’s first-ever milestone of surpassing the $1 trillion mark. In just over 12 months, Nvidia has tripled in value and is on track to overtake Microsoft as the most valuable company in the US.

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Following this significant achievement, Nvidia held a two-hour Computex presentation that can be seen as a victory lap. There were no major announcements made; instead, they reserved reveals for things like Project G-Assist and their new small form factor guidelines for press releases. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang instead spent the time talking about generative AI, how Nvidia powers this generative AI, and why a room full of the most powerful executives in the tech industry should continue to rely on Nvidia’s products.

Nvidia

Just two years ago, Nvidia wasn’t even in the same league as companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Its meteoric rise was triggered by ChatGPT, which set off a frenzy throughout the tech industry less than two years ago. Nvidia’s hardware is at the heart of the GPT model and has since become the gold standard for generative AI hardware in data centers around the world. Its main competitors, AMD (with a market cap of $268 billion) and Intel (with a market cap of $131 billion), have spent the past 18 months trying to respond.

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This remarkable growth is largely due to AI as well. In May, when Nvidia released its financial results, it noted a revenue of $22.6 billion for its data center business, a 427% increase from a year ago. For context, this is nearly 10 times more than its gaming business that sells PC graphics cards, and even that segment saw an 18% growth over the past year. A year ago, the data center business was only twice as large as the gaming business.

It’s a strange situation for gamers who have primarily known Nvidia for its graphics cards, and it’s a strange situation for the tech industry as a whole. We don’t often see massive keynote presentations like the one Nvidia showcased at Computex where there are essentially no announcements. Nvidia is one of the few companies that can hold such a position. The CUDA foundation it has invested in for decades is the bedrock of generative AI, effectively giving Nvidia its own niche in the market that competitors like AMD and Intel have struggled to enter.

AMD

Nvidia is so prominent in generative AI that the US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are launching investigations into Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI, as reported by Politico. These three companies, two of which are now the most valuable companies in the US, are at the center of the generative AI conversation.

Although Nvidia is now the second most valuable company in the US, there is still a fierce battle raging over generative AI. Apple is hosting its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) on Monday, and we expect to see a host of new generative AI features for Apple products. Amazon has also been experimenting with generative AI features over the past year.

The battlefield for the AI war isn’t on your phone or PC; it’s taking place in the data center. Companies like AMD and Intel are the ones vying for Nvidia’s crown, trying to regain the ground they lost since the introduction of ChatGPT.