After months of back-to-back gains in stock value, Nvidia's market capitalization has finally crossed the $2 trillion mark, thanks to the value of the company's stock hitting just over $800 today. This level of market capitalization puts Nvidia on the same level as titans such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft. It also makes Nvidia only the fifth company ever to achieve a market cap of $2 trillion or more.
Market capitalization represents the total value of shares a company has, and since Nvidia's stock price has risen dramatically over the past year, so too has its market cap. A year ago today, Nvidia stock was worth $236.64; at the time of writing, it is worth over $800, representing a gain of over 240 percent. For reference, on average, the S&P500 stock index gains 10% every year, which is considered pretty good in the investing world.
Nvidia's increasingly more expensive stock price is fueled by the AI boom that has transformed the company's finances. On Wednesday, Nvidia announced its Q4 2023 earnings, which showed that it made almost as much money in Q4 as it did in the entirety of 2022. The massive increase in revenue is almost entirely due to demand for Nvidia's datacenter GPUs, which are in high demand for their use in AI applications.
Demand for Nvidia server GPUs is so extreme that the wait list for Nvidia's H100 is over three months long. But that's down from the 11-month wait time expected back in November when Nvidia was still trying to catch up with orders. While insufficient supply is a problem, it's clearly hurting Nvidia, considering its balance sheet and stock price.
The same stock rally that uplifted Nvidia to $2 trillion in market cap has also made its CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, one of the richest people in the world. Since he's been at Nvidia from its inception, he's had plenty of time to accrue shares in his company that are now extremely valuable. Huang is currently the 21st richest person in the world. According to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index, he could climb to 20th place very soon by overtaking Julia Flesher Koch, who was only worth $100 million more than Huang on Thursday.
Of course, stock prices and market capitalization are all at the whims of the stock market, and if traders decide Nvidia has become overvalued, it will send the GPU giant back down. That was the experience of Google, which hit a market cap of $2 trillion on November 8, 2021, but then saw its stock price and market cap dip down.
