Nvidia now world’s most valuable tech firm, beating Microsoft and Apple

The US firm, whose powerful AI chips are in huge demand, is now worth $3.34 trillion (€3.1 trillion), an 11-fold increase on its market capitalisation of $300 billion two years ago and 100 times more valuable than 8 years ago.

It puts CEO Jensen Huang’s personal fortune at an estimated $119bn, making him the 12th richest person in the world according to Bloomberg’s billionaires’ index, based on his shareholding in the company.

61-year-old Mr Huang has been described by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as “the Taylor Swift of tech”, partly due to his habitual prop of using a leather jacket in public appearances.

Born in Taiwan but brought up in the US, Mr Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 at the age of 30 and has been CEO since then, making him one of the longest-serving executives at a major tech firm.

Prior to the AI boom of the last two years, Nvidia was mostly known for its computer gaming chips and graphics cards, sought after by teenagers and other gamers.

While it has no office south of the border, its office is active in Belfast, recently co-investing over €6m in a research and development project into AI with Queen’s University Belfast.

Nvidia has seen demand soar for its chips, as companies scramble for the most powerful engines to power their artificial intelligence (AI) rollouts. AI requires massive computing power, especially when used as cloud services from data centres. Demand for Nvidia’s H100 accelerators helped to drive the chipmaker’s sales up by more than 125pc last year.

“We believe over the next year the race to $4 trillion Market Cap in Tech will be front and center between Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft,” Daniel Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note.

“Nvidia’s GPU chips are in essence the new gold or oil in the tech sector as more enterprises and consumers quickly head down this path.”

Microsoft and Apple have vied for the most valuable tech company tag for the last year, with the Office Windows software giant being on top most of the time.

All three companies are currently valued within 2pc of each other, between Apple ($3.29 trillion), Microsoft ($3.32 trillion) and Nvidia ($3.34 trillion).