Nvidia becomes the world's most valuable company, but will somebody please think about poor old PC gamers?

pcgamer.com:

Remember when Nvidia just made gaming graphics cards? Hard to imagine many at the company do as Nvidia yesterday achieved the remarkable status of «world's most valuable company», overtaking Apple and Microsoft.

That's nice and all, but will somebody please think about PC gamers? Actually, Dave put pretty much that very question directly to His Royal Leather Jacketness, AKA Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, after Nvidia's recent Computex keynote. But hold that thought while we cover off some details. That valuation is based on Nvidia's current share price and thus market capitalisation.

Obviously, such valuations can change pretty quickly. How long Nvidia will retain its new crown is anyone's guess. But as of market close yesterday, Nvidia's share price of $135.58 works out to a market capitalisation of $3.335 trillion. Yes, trillion.

Of course, both Apple and Microsoft are also worth over $3 trillion in market cap terms. So, it's more a case of a trio of titans than Nvidia being in a class of its own. Its status as the most valuable company on paper is pretty notional if not ephemeral. But still, the symbolism of this development is significant.

It is, of course, all driven by Nvidia's success in AI. Exactly how that plays out in future is hard to say. Will Nvidia continue to dominate? Will the likes of Microsoft and Google succeed in building their own AI chips, reducing their dependence on Nvidia?

Might the whole AI thing turn out to be a bit of a ruse? Who knows, though it's worth recalling how quickly cryptocurrency mining came and went as a driver of demand for Nvidia GPUs. What we can say is that we remember the early days of what Nvidia used to call GPGPU or general purpose computing on graphics chips and how that slowly transitioned into the AI juggernaut we have today.

Funnily enough, for years and years nary a mention did Nvidia make of AI. They talked about things like physics simulation, prospecting for fossil fuels, folding proteins, that kind of thing. 

Keep