Shares in computer chip designer Nvidia have soared over the past week, taking the company’s valuation above the one trillion dollar mark.
It means it joins tech giants Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft in the elite club of $1tn US companies.
The surge was sparked by its latest quarterly results which were released late on Wednesday. The company said it was raising production of chips to meet “surging demand”.
Nvidia has come to dominate the market for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
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Interest in that sector reached frenzied levels after ChatGPT went public last November, which sent a jolt well beyond the technology industry.
From helping with speeches, to computer coding and cooking, ChatGPT has proved to be a wildly popular application of AI.
But all that would not be possible without powerful computer hardware – in particular computer chips from California-based Nvidia.
Originally known for making the type of computer chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games, Nvidia hardware underpins most AI applications today.
“It is the leading technology player enabling this new thing called artificial intelligence,” says Alan Priestley, a semiconductor industry analyst at Gartner.
“What Nvidia is to AI is almost like what Intel was to PCs,” adds Dan Hutcheson, an analyst at TechInsights.
ChatGPT was trained using 10,000 of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) clustered together in a supercomputer belonging to Microsoft.