In 2025, NVIDIA has solidified its position as the leader in AI, gaming, and tech innovation, leaving competitors struggling to keep up. On June 18, 2024, Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world, reaching a valuation of $3.34 trillion. They overtook Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and Alphabet.
It is hard to overstate just how significant this is. For perspective, Pokémon, the highest-grossing media franchise in the world, could buy Nvidia 36 times over. And who knows? Nvidia might even be powering the graphics card in the PC you’re using in your home or place of work.
We are talking about a company that overtook Apple you know the guys who managed to sell luxury smartphones to like a third of the world population you don’t beat that just with some high-end PC graphics cards so what on Earth have the Nvidia done to get themselves to a position where they could even dream of overtaking all the other big tech companies and actually overtake them.
One thing that I need to make super clear which makes this all the more surprising is that Nvidia only started in 1993 which is recent enough, the guy who is now CEO Jensen Huang he was the same guy who founded the company along with two other guys Jensen used to work as a waiter’s assistant in a local Denny’s Dino.
Birth of NVIDIA
When he was younger he fell in love with computer science and So eventually went from there to getting his dream job working with AMD one of the leaders at the time as a microprocessor designer until one day when he got an idea Jensen basically realized the key thing that was holding PCS back from an unparalleled performance, (which will be talked about in the later part of this article) he booked a table all the way back where it began at a Denny’s diner with these two other guys and that is famously where they hatched the plan to form Nvidia.
There’s literally a plaque on the wall where that meeting took place. At the time, however, the company didn’t even have a name. So, where did “Nvidia” come from? Most of the guys’ files documenting their plans for this future company were unimaginatively labeled “Next Version.” When they finally decided to move forward, they searched for words containing “envy” in that order. That’s when they discovered the Latin word Invidia, the name of an ancient Roman goddess. Invidia was the personification of envy a rather unpleasant figure with a poisonous tongue and green eyes. And thus, the name “Nvidia” was born.
The Branding And FAME Of NVIDIA
Nvidia was born, and the brand name essentially means “Next Version Envy,” as if to say, “You’re going to be so jealous of our next chip.” Now that you know where the green eye logo comes from, you won’t be able to unsee it without also picturing this haunting image of envy. Now that you’re aware of this origin, you’ll start noticing it woven throughout their branding.
For example, the slogan for the GeForce 8 series graphics cards was Green With Envy, and the company’s highest-end GPUs for a long time were called Titans. Interestingly, in mythology, some ancient Greeks believed Invidia to be the daughter of a Titan. It all ties together seamlessly.
But what actually made Nvidia different? What was this big idea that they were getting together for?, well in 1999 Nvidia released the GeForce 256 the first chip ever to be marketed as a Graphics Processing Unit or GPU a piece of Hardware that could sit alongside your CPU which at this time could only process one calculation at a time and take on the graphics rendering load while you’re gaming using far more efficient parallel processing it was designed to divide big tasks that would previously be done very slowly into smaller parts and then distribute those parts amongst many.
Many small processes of CES which in turn freed up people’s actual CPUs to focus on things like in-game physics the concept of the GPU quickly caught on in both PC and console gaming which pretty much revolutionized gaming and very quickly turned Nvidia into a household name and Nvidia has absolutely killed it with GPU ever since then.
Fun fact actually below is the graphics card I installed on the the first ever PC I built.
Every couple of years they come on stage announcing a new generation of graphics cards and they’ve been so successful at making each one a leap above the last that they’re now outselling their traditional rival AMD you know the company that Jensen originally got his dream job. Nvidia’s first-quarter revenue last year was $26 billion compared to AMD’s measly 5.5 billion Nvidia didn’t get as big as they are today just by coasting on GPU sales here’s the rocket fuel that made their growth explode Nvidia made a huge bet on Al.
How can this be achieved without relying on CPUs, which process tasks sequentially, but instead by utilizing GPUs for parallel processing? Harnessing the full power of a GPU which GP are you most likely going to pick Nvidia, Nvidia being the first company to unlock the full computational power of the GPU for an average developer meant their Cuda software became the default option.
Developers quickly adapted to it, and the CUDA programming environment improved rapidly. Built specifically around Nvidia’s graphics chips, it was highly efficient. This efficiency is comparable to how iPhones achieve exceptional performance, as every thread of iOS software is meticulously designed to work seamlessly with the iPhone’s hardware.
By being forward-thinking and collaborating with other tech companies on AI over the past two decades, Nvidia became deeply embedded in the core of artificial intelligence. Whether it’s researchers running complex simulations to identify proteins that could cure major diseases or Tesla training algorithms for self-driving cars, Nvidia’s technology plays a pivotal role
Nvidia has become an essential player in the tech industry. For example, Tesla is nearing completion of a supercomputer cluster at its Texas Gigafactory, designed to enhance Tesla’s full self-driving capabilities. This cluster relies on $50,000 Nvidia GPUs to power its operations. When AI development exploded over the past few years, tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and more became accessible to everyone. But what powers these tools? When you ask for an image of a robotic flamingo doing a rolly-polly on the moon, what processes that AI request? The answer is Nvidia.
Nvidia’s Tech is also what powers Amazon web services which is the world’s most broadly adopted web services provider they’re the company who builds the infrastructure for basically 30% of the cloud-based internet so the chances are pretty high that anytime you visit a website like ours (involvematrix) there is NVIDIA Tech somewhere along the pipeline that’s bringing it to you that explains the first part of this puzzle how Nvidia became the sole arms dealer of the chips required for the now massive Al industry arms race but how did they go one step further to actually overtake every single other tech company.
In June they decided to do a 10:1 stock split, a 10:1 stock split means that each existing share of a stock is divided into 10 new shares and then it gives an example to say that if you owned 100 shares of a company and they did a 10:1 stock split you would now have th000 shares in your possession but the total value of your investment is the same because it’s just that now each individual share is worth a tenth of what it used to be.
Why does that matter, well it means that for new investors Nvidia shares have just gotten 10 times more affordable so it makes investing in this company much more accessible at a time where the entire world is looking for some way to invest in Al. It became a no-brainer Nvidia’s growth was explosive, both in the present and for the foreseeable future. However, the company recently faced a significant market correction, causing it to drop to the position of the third most valuable company.
There are some question marks around Al like is it being overvalued in the same way that the .COM bubble was? and can the world sustain it? there was a recent study that showed that at the current rate of growth our Al needs alone will consume the amount of power of an entire country the size of the Netherlands but even then now that the Al cat is out of the bag it doesn’t look like Al is going anywhere and even if that happens, there’s no denying that the world is going digital. Movies are now being created using game engine graphics.
Surgeons are now refining their skills by practicing on digital twins of patients before performing actual operations. If the metaverse ever comes to fruition, it will also be powered by Nvidia GPUs. This is how Nvidia has reached its remarkable position in the tech industry today.