Woke up today to two things trending at once and only one of them got any real attention. Nvidia closed yesterday with a market cap north of $3 trillion, which means its now worth more than Apple. Not more than Microsoft, theyre still out in front, but more than Apple. Let that sit for a second. The company that used to be "the GPU maker" is now the second most valuable public company on earth.
Ive been writing this blog since November 2011, and I still have the receipt (literally, I think its in a shoebox somewhere) for a GTX 560 Ti I bought that same year for about $250. It ran Skyrim fine. Nobody in 2011 was buying Nvidia cards because they thought the company would someday be worth more than Apple, they were buying them because their cards were cheaper than the equivalent ATI/AMD option and ran Battlefield 3 without melting. The idea that the exact same company, same ticker, same green logo, would end up here because of AI training chips is the kind of thing that wouldve gotten you laughed out of the room back then.
Meanwhile, and this is the part that actually annoyed me a little, Boeing launched two astronauts to the International Space Station this morning and it barely made a ripple. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams went up on the Starliner capsule, riding an Atlas V out of Cape Canaveral around 10:52 am Eastern. This is the first time Starliner has ever flown people. Boeing has been trying to get this thing off the ground for years, multiple scrubbed launches, a valve issue back in May that pushed the whole schedule back again, and today it finally went and the astronauts made it up fine. That is, by any reasonable measure, a bigger and stranger story than a stock price crossing a round number. A human being just rode a brand new spacecraft into orbit for the first time. Good luck finding that above the fold on a tech site today though, its buried under six Nvidia headlines and a market cap graphic.
I dont think this is a knock on Nvidia specifically. I just think it says something about what counts as news now. A number going up is instantly legible, everyone gets it in half a second with zero context, number bigger than other number, done. A capsule docking with a space station requires you to know a little bit about why it matters, why this particular capsule mattered, why it took this long to get here. Thats just more friction than most headline writers want on a Wednesday.
Not that Im above it either. I checked Nvidias stock price about four times today out of nothing but idle curiosity, the same way youd slow down for a car accident on the highway. I dont own any shares, for what its worth. I bought a 4070 last winter and Im still a little annoyed about what it cost me.
If you want an actual concrete number: as of yesterdays close Nvidias market cap was somewhere around $3.01 trillion, nudging past Apples roughly $2.99 trillion, with Microsoft still comfortably out front at over $3.1 trillion. Apple has its big developer conference next week, so Id bet this particular ranking gets reshuffled again pretty quick depending on what gets announced there. These things move fast when everyone's got earnings and keynotes stacked up back to back like this.
What I keep coming back to is just how strange it is that the "boring" hardware company ended up on top of the pile. For a couple years the whole AI conversation was about the models, the ChatGPTs and the Geminis, the software layer everybody could actually go poke at and form an opinion on. Turns out the company quietly selling the shovels the whole time made out best. I dont have some grand theory about what that means going forward. I just think its worth sitting with for a minute before the next headline replaces it. And meanwhile Wilmore and Williams are up there right now doing actual work in actual orbit, and most of the internet never even clocked that it happened.