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:
- The collective value of every single building in New York City
- The entire agricultural industry of China
- The global aviation industry
- The nominal gross domestic product of France
- The GDP of Texas
- All cryptocurrencies in the world
- The entire U.S. oil-and-gas industry
- The collective net worth of the 12 richest people in the world (now including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (it’s roughly 30 times the net worth of Michael Bloomberg, who does not appear on his own list)
- Every ticket for Taylor Swift’s 2023 eras tour, if she toured for 3,000 consecutive years
Pretty big!
