They overtook Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Alphabet.

It's hard to stress just how big of a deal this is.

I mean, Pokemon, you know, the highest-grossing media franchise in the world?

This could buy that company 36 times.

And we know, NVIDIA.

You might even be watching this video using one of their graphics cards in your PC.

But we're talking a company that overtook Apple.

You know, the guys who manage to sell luxury smartphones to like a third of the world's population.

You don't beat that just with some high-end PC graphics cards.

So what on earth have NVIDIA done?

To A, get themselves to a position where they could even dream of overtaking all the other big tech companies.

And B, actually overtake them.

And one thing that I need to make super clear, which makes this all the more surprising, is that NVIDIA only started in 1993.

Which is recent enough that the guy who is now CEO, Jensen Huang, he was the same guy who founded the company along with two other guys.

Jensen used to work as a waiter's assistant in a local Denny's diner when he was younger.

He fell in love with computer science and so eventually went from there to getting his dream job working with AMD, one of the leaders at the time as a microprocessor designer.

Until one day when he decided, I got an idea.

Jensen basically realized the key thing that was holding PCs back from unparalleled performance, which I'm getting to.

So he booked a table all the way back where it began, at a Denny's diner with these two other guys.

And that is famously where they hatched the plan to form NVIDIA.

There's literally a plaque on the wall where that meeting happened.

But NVIDIA didn't have its name at this point.

Do you know where that came from?

Well, most of the guy's files documenting their plans about this future company had been pretty uncreatively named, Next Version.

So when they decided that we're actually doing this, they looked up words that included NV in that order, and they found the Latin word NVIDIA, which is the name of an ancient Roman goddess.

NVIDIA was the personification of envy, a pretty unpleasant lady with a poisoned tongue and green eyes.

Thus the name NVIDIA was born.

So the brand name basically means Next Version Envy.

Kind of saying, you're going to be so jealous of our next chip.

And now that you know where the green eye logo comes from, you too will no longer be able to see it without also seeing this haunting image alongside it.

So you're welcome.

And now that you know, you will see this origin all across their branding too.

Like the slogan for the GeForce 8 series graphics cards was Green with Envy.

And the company's highest end GPUs for a long time, they were called Titans.

And this NVIDIA was believed by some ancient Greeks to be the daughter of a Titan.

So it all links together.

But what actually made NVIDIA different?

What was this big idea that they were getting together for?

Well, in 1999, NVIDIA released the GeForce 256, the first chip ever to be marketed as a graphics processing unit or GPU.

A piece of hardware that could sit alongside your CPU, which at this time could only process one calculation at a time and take on the graphics rendering load while you're gaming using far more efficient parallel processing.

It was designed to divide big tasks that would previously be done very slowly into smaller parts and then distribute those parts amongst many, many small processor cores, which in turn freed up people's actual CPUs to focus on things like in-game physics.

The concept of the GPU quickly caught on in both PC and console gaming, which pretty much revolutionized gaming and very quickly turned NVIDIA into a household name.

And NVIDIA has absolutely killed it with GPUs ever since then.

Fun fact, actually, this is the graphics card I installed on the first ever PC I built.

Every couple of years, they've come on stage, they've announced a new generation of graphics cards, and they've been so successful at making each one a leap above the last that they're now outselling their traditional rival, AMD, you know, the company who Jensen originally got his dream job working at, to a ridiculous extent.

With NVIDIA's first quarter revenue this year at $26 billion compared to AMD's, well, measly 5.5 billion.

But they didn't get as big as they are today just by coasting on GPU sales.

Here's the rocket fuel that made their growth just explode.

NVIDIA made a huge bet on AI.

In 2006, NVIDIA released CUDA, Compute Unified Device Architecture, which they could have done a better job naming for something that's actually a bit of a game changer.

It was a software platform that allowed the developers of apps to properly utilize the full power of NVIDIA GPUs, even for non-graphics tasks.

Developers could take tasks that would usually be performed one by one on the CPU cores, and instead, just like they've been able to do with games on NVIDIA GPUs, split those tasks up and perform parallel processing using the thousands of GPU cores they now had access to.

This was a big moment for apps.

It made NVIDIA's graphics cards the tool for much more than just gaming.

They became the gold standard for video editors, for financial modelers, cryptocurrency miners, anyone who wanted to do anything with a computer, and most importantly, for any company wanting to build and train a big, powerful AI model.

How do you do that?

Not on CPUs, which are doing things one step at a time, but instead by harnessing the full power of a GPU.

And which GPU are you most likely gonna pick?

NVIDIA's.

NVIDIA being the first company to unlock the full computational power of the GPU for the average developer meant that their CUDA software became the default option.

Developers got comfy with it.

It improved very quickly.

And because this CUDA programming environment was built specifically around NVIDIA's graphics chips, it was super efficient.

It's very similar to how efficient iPhones are because every thread of that iOS software is designed around every fragment of the iPhone hardware.

And with this, by being very forward-thinking, by working with other tech companies on AI for literally the last two decades, NVIDIA became embedded into the very fabric of artificial intelligence.

Whether it's researchers wanting to run complex simulations to figure out what proteins could potentially cure major diseases, or Tesla wanting to train algorithms for their self-driving cars, NVIDIA became the crutch to lean on.

Literally right now, Tesla's nearing completion on a supercomputer cluster at their Texas Gigafactory, which is supposed to improve Tesla's full self-driving using 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs.

And a sub to the channel would be GPU-tiful.

That also could have been better.

And so when AI development exploded over the last couple of years, with every single person and their dog now having access to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and more, what's running all of that?

When we ask for an image of a robotic flamingo doing roly-polies on the moon, what's processing that AI request?

Yes, NVIDIA.

But another crazy bit of context, NVIDIA's tech is also what powers Amazon Web Services, which is the world's most broadly adopted web services provider.

They're the company who builds the infrastructure for basically 30% of the cloud-based internet.

So the chances are pretty high that anytime you visit a website, there is NVIDIA tech somewhere along the pipeline that's bringing it to you.

So that explains the first part of this puzzle, how NVIDIA became the sole arms dealer of the chips required for the now massive AI industry arms race.

But how did they go one step further to actually overtake every single other tech company in June?

Well, they decided to do a 10-to-1 stock split.

And to find out what that is, I can just ask the ARIA AI baked into the Opera browser.

Explain to me a 10-to-1 stock split in two sentences with an example.

Right, so a 10-to-1 stock split means that each existing share of a stock is divided into 10 new shares.

And then it gives an example to say that if you owned 100 shares of a company and they did a 10-to-1 stock split, you would now have 1,000 shares in your possession.

But the total value of your investment is the same because it's just that now each individual share is worth a 10th of what it used to be.

Why does that matter?

Well, it means that for new investors, NVIDIA shares have just gotten 10 times more affordable.

So it makes investing in this company much more accessible at a time where the entire world is looking for some way to invest in AI.

It became a no-brainer.

It was explosive, as for now and the future.

While NVIDIA has been hit with a pretty severe market correction, so they're back down into third most valuable company.

And while there are some question marks around AI, like is it being overvalued in the same way that the dot-com bubble was?

And can the world sustain it?

Because, you know, there was a recent study that showed that at the current rate of growth, our AI needs alone will consume the amount of power of an entire country the size of the Netherlands.

But even then, now that the AI cat is out the bag, it doesn't look like AI is going anywhere.

And even if it does, there's no changing that the world is going digital.

Movies are now being made using game engine graphics.

Surgeons are now honing their craft using digital twins of patients before operating on the real thing.

The metaverse, if that ever comes to fruition, it's all being powered by NVIDIA GPUs.

So that's how NVIDIA got to the crazy position that they're currently in.

And by the way, ARIA isn't even the most fun thing about the Opera browser anymore.

So you've seen how tab islands can help you group together all of your tasks into buckets so they're organized.

But now you can hover over any tab and add a tab emoji too.

Why?

Well, aside from a delightful touch of customization, I've had two benefits from this.

One, that every time I have two similar tabs open, this allows me to differentiate them.

Instead of persistently gaslighting myself into opening the wrong one every time.

But also when you're browsing, you tend to have one or two key tabs.

Like for me, it's the document I'm compiling all of my research into.

And tab emojis mean that even if you've got like 40 things open at once, I always know to return to my cooking emoji.

So give it a go using my link in the description.