The World’s Largest Semiconductor Companies 2024: Why Nvidia Is The Hottest Stock Of The Decade

The first two companies to eclipse a $3 trillion market cap in the last two years, Apple and Microsoft, have been well-known names since the 1980s, but the third would likely have come as a shock to even the most astute investors a decade ago.

When Nvidia reached $3 trillion last week just three months after crossing $2 trillion, it marked another milestone in a bull run that still isn’t slowing down. The semiconductor designer has been the biggest winner of the generative AI boom since ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022, rising eightfold since then.

Based in Santa Clara, California, Nvidia wasn’t even in the top 1,000 of the Forbes Global 2000 ranking the world’s largest public companies until 2017, but it has steadily risen in the rankings to its perch at No. 110 this year, 131 spots higher than last year. The list weights market value, revenue, profit and assets equally using the last 12 months of data as of May 17, and Nvidia still trails hundreds of companies in sales and total assets, but if it stays anywhere near its current growth rates, it won’t take long to rise much higher in the ranks.

“The next Industrial Revolution has begun,” Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang, whose net worth has ballooned to $100 billion, said on its first-quarter earnings call in May. “Companies and countries are partnering with Nvidia to shift the trillion-dollar installed base of traditional data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center, AI factories, to produce a new commodity, artificial intelligence.”

Nvidia’s $61 billion in profits in its most recent fiscal year ending in January more than doubled from the previous year and its margins are unmatched among companies of its scale, with $30 billion in net profit. Its growth rate accelerated in the first quarter ending in April, recording $26 billion in revenue—262% higher than last year—and $15 billion in net profit in a single quarter, while total assets grew 17% to $77 billion. These numbers, reported on May 22, were too late to take into account for the Global 2000 list, but would have comfortably pushed Nvidia into the top 100.

“You typically see these growth numbers at a startup. Let’s be real, you don’t see triple-digit growth rates with any established companies,” says Harsh Kumar, a semiconductors analyst at Piper Sandler. “Here you have a company that will do $100 billion this fiscal year in January 2025 that’s growing at this kind of rate.”

Nvidia’s growth is almost entirely thanks to its dominance in designing graphics processing units (GPUs), which account for most of its revenue. The company created the proprietary CUDA coding language in 2006 that has become the gold standard to use for programming GPUs. Before the recent AI rush, the types of chips were primarily used for rendering graphics, video editing and visualizations in gaming. They are uniquely capable of processing vast amounts of information quickly on parallel tracks, and their usefulness later expanded to applications like voice translation, or tracking your direction on a map while turning. Now, with generative AI creating numerous other use cases that require high computing power, everyone wants to get their hands on Nvidia’s GPUs.

A few other firms have ridden the coattails of Nvidia’s rise and become secondary players in the GPU niche, including Advanced Micro Devices, which rose more than 200 spots to No. 343 on the Global 2000. AMD’s billionaire CEO Lisa Su said in April the company expects to generate $4 billion in data center GPU revenue this year, far from Nvidia’s near-$100 billion forecast in that category but still more than anyone else. Its stock is up a more modest 25% in the last year and 150% since the start of 2023. AMD has a market capitalization of $260 billion.

Intel, the established chipmaker founded in 1968 that developed the x86 architecture that is widely used in computers, is at No. 107 on the list and rebounded 315 spots after plunging to 422nd last year due to inventory restructuring and other accounting quirks that caused it to be unprofitable in last year’s data. It’s still ahead of Nvidia solely because it has $193 billion in total assets, but its $55 billion in sales have slightly declined since last year and its market cap is stagnant at $135 billion. Intel’s market cap peaked at more than $500 billion in 2000 during the dotcom bubble and it was 65th on the inaugural Global 2000 in 2003, but it has lost influence since then. Intel has begun to make GPUs to include in computers, but not at the same scale as Nvidia.

“Nvidia has been making GPUs for 20-plus years, with all the software that goes with that, all the developers that have been working on that, and so on, so that has given them a massive lead,” says Daiwa Capital analyst Louis Miscioscia. “They have 90-95% market share.”

Broadcom, another Silicon Valley veteran, founded two years before Nvidia in 1991, has adapted better to the new semiconductor landscape and still has lucrative deals for customized chips with tech giants like Google and Meta. Its $69 billion deal to buy cloud computing firm VMWare also closed last November, and its stock is up 165% since the start of 2023, lifting its market cap to a record high near $700 billion. Broadcom climbed 60 spots to No. 74 on this year’s Global 2000.

“Broadcom has somewhat of a unique approach. They don’t make chips that you can buy off the shelf—they work with specific customers,” says Kumar. “If you took the overall picture, I’d say you would have Nvidia at the top, you would have Broadcom second and then you would have AMD third in the GPU space. Intel would be a distant fourth.”

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