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Nvidia Becomes First Company to Reach $4T Market Cap
- chubot 1y agoOne meta-lesson is probably that sustained effort by the same people or same culture matters i.e. maybe you need “two hits” to become this big, separated by ~2 decades For nvidia, it was graphics and then programmable GPUs (CUDA) For Apple, it was GUI desktops and music players/phones Google is up there, but I’d argue it’s closer to “one hit”, and limited by the founders stepping back and turning the company into an investment conglomerate, rather than being mission-based When the founders leave, efficiency and creativity seem to be slowed by competing factions of upper management, often working at cross purposes I’d say that in the best cases, institutional knowledge can build over 2 decades, but it’s also very possible to lose it
- floxy 1y agoAmazon ($2.3T)? Microsoft ($3.7T)? Meta ($1.8T)?
- xrendan 1y agoAmazon - Ecommerce (1994), AWS (2006) Microsoft - Programming Language (1975), Operating Systems (1981), Office Suite (1983) Meta - Facebook (2004), Instagram (2010) I would argue microsoft is unique because of how badly IBM screwed up.
- 0xcafefood 1y agoMicrosoft also has Azure and its gaming division.
- jahsome 1y agoBooks and AWS EEE and owning the soul of every customer Facebook and cool zuck
- nativeit 1y agoCrazy what a near total lack of anticompetitive regulatory enforcement can do for a monopoly’s value, amirite?
- chubot 1y agoI'd say Amazon had 2 hits - Online retail, and then cloud computing. (AWS is now most of their profit.) And even Warren Buffett said that it's unusual for a company to succeed in two different areas, yet Amazon did it. I would say Meta had only one hit -- social networking. Instagram and Whatsapp were good acquistions, but I think of them more as monopoly plays. Zuck has been investing in VR and AI, looking for the next big thing -- but like Google, he doesn't really know what it is. I'd say it's more driven by a desire to be big and powerful and profitable, than by mission (although of course every case is a mix) I'd argue that Google also has one hit. Chrome and Android are impressive, but they are not businesses on their own. Self-driving cars didn't turn into a great business. Google invented transformers, and OpenAI turned it into a product. But neither one got the product + business combo right. OpenAI is very far from profitable, and Gemini looks like a ChatGPT clone to me. Microsoft is a weird case -- I'd argue that they were second in most of their hits: - Windows - the GUI desktop was second to Apple - Enterprise software - Excel was second to Lotus; Word was second to WordPerfect; databases were second to Oracle - Cloud - Azure was second to Amazon - Bing - was second to Google I think Microsoft got to $3T by operational competence -- by cloning and embrace and extend, as opposed to nailing a new hit product + the associated business. I would give them credit for the early BASIC and OS, but I don't think that's how they reached $3T. Whereas Google basically reached $2T with search+ads, and Meta with social networking. --- To summarize my off the cuff theory, which I admit you can poke holes in: - Apple, Amazon, Nvidia: nailed a hit product + associated business combo TWICE - Google, Meta: nailed it ONCE (and they are younger companies, so to be charitable, they may not have had time) - Microsoft: a special case
- floxy 1y agoWhat I should have done is look up companies by market cap, instead of just picking them off-the-cuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ..there are some other interesting companies to consider: Saudi Aramco, Broadcom, TMSC, PetroChina, Berkshire Hathaway
- Jlagreen 1y agoAWS for Amazon was a logical step because who is AWS largest customer? Amazon of course. If you build large eCommerce like Amazon then of course you need huge IT infrastructure for it. Amazon was kind of forced to build the IT infrastructure and in that process Bezos saw another business opportunity because not every smaller company can easily build large IT infrastructure but many companies need it. And just as AWS built "SW services" for Amazon eCommerce it also became the foundation of the cloud business.
- bayarearefugee 1y agoAnother lesson is to try to be incredibly lucky. I'm not suggesting this is all luck, Nvidia has executed very well and their early investments in programmable GPUs really paid off as a result, but a lot of their insane valuation now is due to crypto and then LLMs which are basically two back to back once in lifetime goldrushes where Nvidia happened to be the best positioned shovel seller. You can run a company well to prepare to ride such a wave should it appear, but you've also got to be born with horseshoes up your ass for this to work out as well as it has for Nvidia
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoThe other thing I find interesting is that Jensen Huang has said that he wouldn't do it all over again. That is, knowing how hard it is now to build a startup, he wouldn't do it again. I find this pretty crazy given that (at least for now) NVidia is the most successful startup of all time. Imagine the millions of other entrepreneurs, many of whom worked just as hard, who completely failed in the process.
- pllbnk 1y agoThere's almost nothing interesting that any CEO says publicly, including this. They're celebrities; they'll say anything that helps them get higher in the celebrity popularity contest even if they're contradicting themselves during every other interview.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoOne of my favorite quotes is, "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity" :)
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoYes but opportunities are random. I recently read in the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 (it is absolutely good article) and the first comment there which I wanted to paste here is:- It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.) -Bruce_511 (HN) So sure preparation meets opportunity but don't be stubborn just cause you feel like you are prepared. Work hard but honestly, if you walk the line like bruce said (then persistence will result in you doing the hard work too tbh that's my philosophy right now) So Everybody just need to figure out this line b/w stubborness and persistance especially in the startup world. But I think we need a book written on this topic tbh, any suggestions anybody?
- dachworker 1y agoNVIDIA put a lot of effort into making their hardware and accompanying software useful and usable. CUDA by itself might have never got any attention if not for the effort that NVIDIA puts into helping their customers use their technology, effectively. And they are by no means perfect at it. Most of their products are a horrible mess and they often have 7 different ways to do the same thing. A lot of their libraries are closed source and you're forced to use an API that links to a black box. There's lots to complain about.
- LarsDu88 1y agoI think Nvidia's market development efforts have meant more than its culture. Ever since Nvidia started moving towards general purpose compute with the 8800 GPU back in the mid 2000s, it's been actively growing markets - first in research (leading to AI advances), and now in autonomous driving, world simulation, biotechnology, and robotics. The market for compute is endless, and Nvidia makes huge efforts to commoditize the software side of things so people can buy hardware.
- chubot 1y agoWell, I'd say that actively growing markets and seeking out new application areas is part of a company culture. For example, I'd argue it's a thing that's NOT in Google culture. Google culture is more about technical advantage, scalability, etc. These kinds of values are typically enforced by employee performance evaluations and so forth
- basch 1y agoisnt the modern LLM frenzy googles second?
- chubot 1y agoTo balance my own viewpoint, another way to look at it is that the dollar is weak, and will probably get weaker for the next 10 to 50 years So that is helping Nvidia reach $4T, and all the other tech companies They also probably have good ways of offsetting the weakness of the dollar, whereas regular citizens and investors don't
- kraemate 1y agoWow, who knew making proprietary accelerators could be so profitable.
- Yeul 1y agoEvery time Jensen speaks the AI word on a stage the company value goes up by a billion.
- anonymars 1y agoIt stuns me that a trillion (much less 4) is so incomprehensibly large that this is entirely mathematically plausible
- cratermoon 1y agoRelated? https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/29/nvidia-insiders-1-billion-stock-sales.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/29/nvidia-insiders-1-billion-st...
- LarsDu88 1y agoTo think the entire company could have failed multiple times in the 90s if not for Sega's CEO bailing Nvidia out after Sega fucked up the Dreamcast contract. And even if Nvidia had won that contract, the Dreamcast ultimately failed. Nvidia was close to destruction multiple times in its early years.
- lvl155 1y agoI thought Apple would drive it to the ground after their fallout considering how Jobs handled things. Nvidia rode that crypto wave and AI was there at the very end of that rainbow. Having said that, they kept at CUDA all these years even before pandemic. They earned it 100%!
- nativeit 1y agoTime for some grossly oversimplified back-of-the-proverbial-envelope value crunching! I’ll assume the average GPU price, for the sake of argument, is $1000. Let’s also assume their per-unit profit margin is roughly 30% (I found conflicting numbers for this on a casual search, esp. between figures that measure quarterly and annual income, I suppose it isn’t a surprise that their accountants frequently pull rabbits from hats). Nvidia would need to move on the order of 4,000,000,000 units to hit $4T in revenue, more than triple that to realize $4T in profits. Even if the average per-unit costs are 2-3x my estimated $1k, as near as I’ve been able to tell they “only” move a few million units each year for a given sku. I am struggling to work out how these markets get so inflated, such that it pins a company’s worth to some astronomical figure (some 50x total equity, in this case) that seems wholly untethered to any material potential? My intuition is that the absence of the rapid, generationally transformative, advances in tech and industry that were largely seen in the latter half of the 20th-century (quickly followed with smartphones and social networking), stock market investors seem content to force similar patterns onto any marginally plausible narrative that can provide the same aesthetics of growth, even if the most basic arithmetic thoroughly perforates it. That said, I nearly went bankrupt buying a used car recently, so this is a whole lot of unqualified conjecture on my part (but not for nothing, my admittedly limited personal wealth isn’t heavily dependent on such bets).
- wredcoll 1y agoIt seems fairly obvious, to me, that the issue is that most people make money from the stock price changing rather than from any kind of intrinisic value of the underlying company. In other words, why should it matter to me what the company's profit margin or asset base or what not is actually worth when I make money if the stock number goes up?
- sokoloff 1y agoIn the short run, markets are a voting machine; in the long run, they’re a weighing machine. — Ben Graham If you own a slice of nVidia’s shares at a current P/E of 37, after a year, they’ve earned 2.7% of the value and you still have the same stake as you did before. That’s pricing in further growth and upside in earnings from here (otherwise, you could buy US treasuries at a better price), but doesn’t seem outrageous to me. Disclaimer: I don’t directly own any $NVDA; I do own mutual funds that own some.
- TriangleEdge 1y agoThe next question is: will I be alive to see the first quadrillion dollar company? Or maybe a 100$ banana?
- thomassmith65 1y agoCongratulations to Nvidia. That said, I would be wary about buying shares of any company tied to AI right now. Very few people scrambling to throw money into 'AI stocks' have any idea about technology. When the music stops it's going to be ugly.
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- ra7 1y agoI understand Nvidia is in a very dominant position. But $4T market cap still seems absolutely insane to me. I've only read about the Cisco boom and bust during the Internet era, and this feels eerily similar (people who actually experienced it might feel differently though). What could actually drag Nvidia down and make them spend decades in the dark like Cisco still does? So far the two things I've come up with are: (a) general disillusionment in AI and companies not being able to monetize enough to justify spending on GPUs. (b) Big companies designing their own chips in-house lowering demand for Nvidia GPUs. I don't think Nvidia can counter (a), but can they overcome (b) by also offering custom chip design services instead of insisting on selling a proprietary AI stack?
- fckgw 1y agoAlso just LLMs getting more efficient in general can lead to the end of the GPU buying frenzy
- bigyabai 1y agoI don't really buy it. If you can get GPT-3 performance out of a 4B parameter model, then people are going to use the GPUs for even higher-quality remote inference.
- blitzo 1y agoIf China finally figured out how to make whatever machines ASML does, that the sell signal for NVDA.
- oersted 1y agoI do broadly agree, but want to note that the ASML machines are not necessarily the bottleneck, or at least not the final bottleneck, and their valuation reflects that. There’s a reason why only TSMC and to a lesser extent now Samsung and Intel are the only serious players in top-end semiconductors. You can’t just buy the machine and print chips, the amount of iterative tuning and know-how required to get good yields is immense. Weirdly, the actual bottleneck seems to be the availability of what can almost be described as “master craftsmanship”. But it’s not enough either to hire a couple of masters, it’s the collective institutional knowledge built up over >50 years. And, of course, TSMC is not worth nearly as much as NVidia either even if they manufacture all their hardware.
- amelius 1y agoTime to start building their own fab, I would say.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago...no? Leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing is incredibly difficult. Keeping pace with it is nearly impossible. Many companies and entire countries have tried - and failed, over and over and over. You can't just throw billions of dollars at the problem and hope you solve it. It is far, far smarter to design the chips and leave the manufacturing to others who will have the expertise and take on the risk.
- amelius 1y agoThere isn't that much competition, and don't forget about recent silicon fabbing shortages.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoTSMC isn't 'that much' competition? Good luck beating them at it. They're essentially the only game in town for top-end silicon. AMD tried, realized it was completely pointless and split off into Global Foundries. The giant Intel struggled incredibly hard with the 10nm node and has now lost significant ground because of it. Leading edge silicon is ruthless. You can burn hundreds of billions of dollars a year trying to catch up and if your product is even slightly worse it may as well be worthless - all the cost with none of the demand. Going into older nodes is far more forgiving, but you can't make GPUs with that.
- lossolo 1y agoIt's only a matter of time, SMIC will have all the funding it needs. They've hired former TSMC staff, and they have Huawei as a research hub, with its 30,000 person research campus. Huawei is also working on its own EUV machines and researching the next generation of chip-making technologies. China has some of the best technical universities in the world. Many of the names you see in the U.S. AI/ML space are Chinese — and a significant number have returned to China, seeking new opportunities. The world has changed. By 2035, China could be on par with TSMC, or even surpass it. Once, there were Nokias and Kodaks — and like them, TSMC will eventually face real competition. Nothing is eternal. TSMC doesn't possess secret knowledge that others can't obtain or special brains that others cannot match. China’s future security and competitive edge depend on becoming self-sufficient in advanced node production. They now have all the necessary ingredients, more than anyone before, to challenge and possibly overtake TSMC. It's only a matter of time.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoLunacy for a company that doesn't physically make anything but emails a design to TSMC in geopolitically risky Taiwan.
- beng-nl 1y agoIt’s a bit short sighted to say that nvidia doesn’t physically make anything. Because they sure as hell physically sell something. One of the most wanted products on earth. For huge margins.
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- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoWhere is the Nvidia factory?
- mg 1y agoOver time, will humans turn all of planet Earth into an active system? If so, the total addressable market of Nvidia might be pretty big. Let's take the human body as a point of reference. The weight of the human brain makes up about 2% of the human body. Earth weighs in at about 10^25 kg. 2% of that is about 10^22 kg. All computer hardware on planet Earth weighs what? Maybe a billion computers times 10 kg? That would be 10^10 kg. So we still would have to up that by a factor of 10^12. Still 99.99999999% of the way to go.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoSmells like Universal Paperclips
- timerol 1y ago$4T isn't cool. You know what's cool? $2^32
- firefax 1y agoMaybe I suck at searching, but I'm surprised there isn't a Wikipedia list of companies by market cap.
- nemothekid 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
- firefax 1y agothanks!
- orlp 1y agoLiterally pasting "Wikipedia list of companies by market cap" into Google gives me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by....
- firefax 1y agoDuckduckgo, why did you fail me ;_; The duck is usually so well behaved!
- lowsong 1y agoAI definitely isn't a bubble though, don't worry about it.
- EcommerceFlow 1y agoWhat percent of the population currently uses Ai? 5%? This is a technology that will reach 90% usage for almost everything people do, so there is still so much more growth to go.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoI sincerely hope not
- babypuncher 1y agoEverybody already uses AI, it's being shoved down our throats. You literally cannot use Google or Amazon without AI nonsense popping up. People don't seem too happy about it though. I can't say that these features have improved my Amazon or Google experiences. In fact, in the case of the latter, the experience has only gotten worse as they've injected more AI.
- ponector 1y agoAnd you forgot to mention Apple Intelligence!
- vivzkestrel 1y agoi ll give you the opposite viewpoint. 90% people are using AI because it is being forcefully shoved into google, amazon, microsoft etc. Most AI models offer little value at the moment and once the novelty wears off, even a real AI breakthrough will create aversion amongst the masses, this ll cause a huge crash
- phantompeace 1y agoEh, I don’t see it. People will try the new ChatGPT killer for sure, especially if all the first gen issues were fixed (lack of current world knowledge, hallucinations etc). I think the bubble is due a big pop but I don’t think it’s going to be that huge of a crash unless China somehow catches up
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- pinkmuffinere 1y agoMy personal pet peeve is comparisons like this, which aren’t inflation-adjusted. Is this a higher real valuation than the any other company in existence so far? From the information provided, it is unclear. Edit: scrolling through the entries in the Wikipedia page here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...), it seems likely that this is the highest valuation in real terms (ie, adjusted for inflation)
- bentt 1y agoI'm afraid this primarily means that dollars are worth a lot less than they used to be.
- nkzd 1y agoI don't fundamentally get it. How can a fragile company which doesn't even make their own chips be the most valuable company in the world. Why is it not some oil or shipping company? Something more "fundamental" in sense. Can someone explain how can Nvidia make so much money selling inference to big silicon valley companies?
- TheAlchemist 1y agoThis should be compared though to the general trend in current US stocks valuations, that are on par with Tulip Mania and Dot-com bubble. Some examples: - Palantir - valued at 337B USD (more than Meta less than 3 years ago !), with a revenue of 2B and net incomre 500M - Gamestop - valued at 10B USD, with a quickly declining revenue of 4B and net income 100M (they lost money most of the time in the past 10 years) - Coreweave - valued at 74B USD, on 1B revenue (growing quickly), 300m net loss, and very discutable accounting - Tesla - valued at 1000B USD, on 100B revenue (which is now collapsing), 7B net income which will most probably turn into a less starting this quarter (no more ZEV credits) or next quarter (no more 7500$ subsides) - xAI - valued at what, 100B USD ? On probably 0 revenue and huge losses. Same goes for OpenAI, SpaceX etc, and I'm not even starting to talk about crypto (yeah, Dogecoin has a 'market cap' of 27B USD...). We are living almost unprecedented times in terms of US stock valuations.
- boshalfoshal 1y agoI think Teslas valuation is a bit disconnected from fundamentals too, but saying "collapsing" revenue is a bit dramatic.
- TheAlchemist 1y agoA 20% QoQ revenue decline, is almost unheard of for the company of this size. Not longer than 1 year ago, Tesla was still officially projecting 50% YoY growth until 2030.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoJust looking at p/e and p/s ratios is not enough. Amazon also had a p/e over 100 and a p/s over 10 in its earlier history. You also have to look at the market size these companies are addressing while having few competitors. Tesla for example is addressing "driving cars" with its self-driving project. There are 2B cars on the road. If we value driving them at $5 per day, that is $5 * 365 * 2B = $3650B in annual value. Capturing 10% of that would be $365B per year. At a p/e of 30 that is over $10T - ten times Tesla's current market cap.
- hazmazlaz 1y agoThe unspoken, rarely acknowledged element of this story and other valuation stories is the devaluation of the US Dollar. That certainly contributes to the trend of record valuation after record valuation.