A chip-maker you’re maybe just vaguely aware of is now bigger than China’s entire farming industry.
When there’s a new biggest company in the world, that tells you something about the ways in which global capital is moving. On Tuesday, that company was Nvidia, which has continued its startling rise past Apple and Microsoft to become the most valuable in the world.
Nvidia’s rise is a result of a worldwide scramble to put as much money as possible into companies that have anything to do with artificial intelligence. In the case of Nvidia, it’s not a stretch: The company makes specialty processors that power AI programs. So as AI grows, so will (according to the dominant view on Wall Street right now) demand for its chips, putting the company at the center of what could be the biggest tech boom in history. By the end of the trading day on Tuesday, all the shares of Nvidia put together were worth $3.35 trillion — up about three times since January 1.
That’s a very big number — one that is so large it is difficult to conceptualize. So how big is Nvidia? Here is an incomplete list of things that the chip-maker is more valuable than as of today:
Pretty big!
