Nvidia's CEO Briefly Reaches $100 Billion Milestone As AI Company Nears Apple's Value

 Nvidia stock’s rally to yet another major milestone Tuesday made its CEO Jensen Huang a centibillionaire for part of Tuesday afternoon, as the artificial intelligence technology architect closes in on Apple to become the second-most valuable company in the world.

 Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and largest individual shareholder with a 3.7% stake, became $6.6 billion richer Tuesday, with his net worth hitting above $100 billion for the first time, becoming one of only 16 people in the world worth over $100 billion, according to Forbes’ estimates (Huang’s net worth ended the day just below $100 billion, at $99.9 billion).

The record-setting day for Huang’s fortune unsurprisingly came as Nvidia’s stock soared to an all-time high, surging past a $1,100 share price for the first time as shares rose 7% to $1,141.

Tuesday’s rally tacked on about $190 billion to Nvidia’s market capitalization, which shot up to $2.8 billion.

That’s just $108 billion shy of Apple’s $2.9 trillion market value and less than $400 billion shy of Microsoft’s $3.2 trillion market cap, a stunning transformation from Nvidia’s sub-$100 billion valuation just five years ago to becoming the leader of Wall Street’s next frontier.

More than $600 billion. That’s how much market cap Nvidia has gained just over the last month, mostly since releasing its latest batch of quarterly earnings last Wednesday. That gain, accomplished over just three trading sessions, is larger than the entire market values of all but 11 public companies globally, outranking those of Tesla, JPMorgan Chase and Walmart

“Every company that wants to do something with AI has to pay for Nvidia's expensive GPU chips,” Yardeni Research founder Ed Yardeni wrote in a Tuesday note to clients, summarizing the lucrative stranglehold Nvidia enjoys in the rapidly growing graphics processing unit (GPU) technology space. Nvidia designs a reported of the GPU semiconductor chips necessary to power AI.

Based in Santa Clara, Nvidia is the quintessential Silicon Valley firm, tracing its roots to the humble origins to a conversation at a Denny’s diner in 1993, keeping its founding CEO Huang, perhaps best known publicly for his patented black leather jacket look, at the helm for its entire 31-year existence. Huang is still $105 billion poorer than the world’s richest person Bernard Arnault and $100 billion poorer than the richest person in the U.S., Jeff Bezos. Nvidia’s market value, fame and financial performance have all grown exponentially over the past two years as public interest in AI boomed. Nvidia’s profit of $15 billion during its first full quarter of 2024 was about 40 times higher than its net income during 2019’s comparable period and even seven times greater than last year’s comparable profit.