Some 26 years before Nvidia this week briefly became the world’s most valuable company , things were not looking so rosy for the microchip maker and its chief executive, Jensen Huang. Indeed, such was the perilous state of the company’s finances in 1997 that Mr Huang later revealed there had only been sufficient funds to pay staff for another month. It was a moment of jeopardy which Nvidia’s Taiwan-born co-founder, who now finds himself the 11th richest person on the planet after his company’s soaring share price gave him a personal fortune worth $119bn (£94bn), has used as something of a modus vivendi ever since.
For years afterwards, he would warn his workforce : “Our company is 30 days from going out of business.” The extent to which any such threat of demise for Nvidia would now be seen as laughably remote was underlined on Tuesday when the California-based corporation achieved a market valuation of $3.335trn – and in so doing, became the world’s most valuable listed company.
The valuation of Nvidia put it ahead of Microsoft at $3.317trn, before then falling back later this week. But the stockmarket machinations nonetheless cemented the chip maker’s status as only the third ever company to be worth more than $3trn.
Its ascendancy to the first rank of global technology behemoths alongside the likes of Apple , Meta , Amazon and Google . It is also increasingly propelling Mr Huang, already known among tech watchers not only for his innovatory heft but also.
