Not that it is a formal competition, but the mantle of the world’s most valuable publicly-listed corporation has been retaken by Nvidia which has a market capitalisation larger than the French economy.
Odious as comparisons like this are, the 32-year-old American computer chip maker would be the seventh largest economy in the world if it was a country.
NVIDIA shares rose 2.9% on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), closing at US$141.40. This capitalised the company at US$3.45 trillion (A$5.3 trillion), surpassing another technology giant Microsoft, which is worth $3.44 trillion.
Another member of the so-called Magnificent 7 largest technology companies, Apple, trails in third place at $3.04 trillion.
This gives NVIDIA a market value larger than the world’s seventh largest economy, France, which has a gross domestic product (GDP) of $3.28 trillion.
It also marks a recovery for the graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer which lost its number one position in January amid a sell-off sparked by concerns about Chinese inroads into an artificial intelligence (AI) market dominated by U.S. companies.
The selling slashed NVIDIA's value by more than $590 billion in a single day, but the company has since recovered.
The stock has risen almost 24% over the last month due to the dominance in the artificial intelligence (AI) hardware market of its GPUs, which are used by leading developers like OpenAI to train language models such as ChatGPT.
CEO and joint founder Jensen Huang has maintained a high profile in promoting NVIDIA's capabilities, last week announcing a next-generation United States supercomputer powered by its forthcoming Vera Rubin chips.
