I have always met Nvidia for video games, for those graphic cards that each serious player considered an indispensable weapon, a kind of neural extension of visual power, with indecipherable acronyms such as RTX, Ti, Super, Max-Q, and an obsession with the Ray Tracing which seemed more important than the plot of the game itself. Nvidia was (and still is) synonymous with graphic performance, the company that allowed to see the reflection of a grenade in the glass of a car while exploding in real time in Call of Duty, the brand that separated those who played from those who waited for the game to load.
Until artificial intelligence has arrived and the jump was total. I mean: the same GPUs (the graphic cards) born to make the animations more fluid, the deeper the shadows and more detailed the hair of the characters have proved perfect also to train neural models. Indeed, not perfect: indispensable. Today the NVIDIA GPUs are the global standard for training and execution of generative IA models. Without them, Chatgpt, Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, Xai, even the internal models of Meta and Amazon, simply would not exist, could not work. If the IA is a brain, Nvidia is its nervous system.
So while everyone looked at Apple, Microsoft and Google, Nvidia has overcome everyone and Wednesday reached a goal that no company had ever touched before: a market capitalization of 4,010 billion dollars. The shares, up 2.8%, touched the historical maximum of 164.42 dollars, confirming a trend that has lasted for years but which in recent months has become exponential. Suffice it to say that in July 2015, a NVIDIA action was worth about $ 0.5 (net of the split): it means that in ten years he made +35,000%, against +260% of the ‘P 500 in the same period. An investment of $ 1,000 in 2015 today would be worth 350,000, a performance that makes any other big tech pale.
In 2023 Nvidia exceeded the threshold of 1,000 billion, later the 2,000, after 3,000, and finally the 4,000 in just over twelve months. An acceleration that has accompanied, if not even anticipated, the global fever for artificial intelligence. The CEO and co -founder Jensen Huang, who started from a first job as a dishwasher in a Denny’s, today is the richest ninth person in the world with an estimated heritage of 142 billion dollars and thanks to a participation of 3.5% into a company that has been able to transform a hardware niche into an essential infrastructure for the digital future.
Nvidia is no longer a video cards company: it has become the platform on which the new AI economy is built, a transformation that in ten years has brought it from 10 billion evaluation to 4,000 and which today makes it not only the largest company in the world by capitalization but also the one with the most central and less replaceable role in the ecosystem of innovation.
There is a story that has been running for some time: if from the first
IPhone instead of changing one every year we had invested 20000 euros in Apple shares, today we would have around 140 million. I didn’t do it, and no, I never thought of buying Nvidia actions. Who envies for those who did it.