Nvidia Hit $4 Trillion: From Bankruptcy to owning AI future | Vantage with Palki Sharma

0:00 Heat. [Music] There's an old saying in Silicon Valley, in a gold rush, do not dig for gold,

0:45 sell the shovels. In today's AI gold rush, everyone is chasing the gold. Companies are pivoting to artificial intelligence, but Nvidia is selling the shovels. It is this company that is powering the AI pivot and their strategy is paying off. This week, Nvidia briefly touched the $4 trillion market cap. $4 trillion in market value for a single company. If it were a country, it would sit between India and Japan among the top five economies in the world. And that tells you something. Nvidia is the first ever company to reach this milestone. Its market value is more than several nations combined. And this is a very big deal for the tech world. Probably the biggest news since

1:31 Apple touch launched the iPhone. Apple became the first company to reach $3 trillion. Nvidia has now taken a step further. And the market believes it's only an upward trajectory for now. Why is this our lead story tonight? Because this is not just a market story. This is a moment that captures the shape of the future, the age of artificial intelligence, the new world order of tech power. It shows how a graphics card company became the engine of the global economy. In 2015, Nvidia was worth less than $20 billion. In 2020, it was at a little over 300 billion. Today, it is $4 trillion. That's a 40x jump in 5 years. Had you bought a few hundred shares 25 years

2:17 ago, you'd be rolling in money today, probably ready to retire. But back then, not many people saw this coming. Even Nvidia did not set out to lead the AI revolution. Their story began in 1993 with a man named Jensen Hang. He was sitting in a California diner with his two co-founders. They wanted to make a graphics chip, something that powers video games. That's what they wanted to make. So, Huang and his team came up with a name, Nvision. But this name was already taken. So, they settled on another one, Nvidia. It is derived from the Latin Nvidia, which means envy. 30 years on, their competitors are truly green with envy.

3:04 But it hasn't always been this good. If you chart Nvidia's market cap over time, the early years looked like a flat line. In 1995, the company almost went bust. A key chip release failed. Nvidia was nearly bankrupt. But after that, it steadied, although it was still making only graphic processing units or GPUs for video games. Then in 2013 came the big pivot. Jensen Huang noticed something. GPUs were good for machine learning, so he bet on it. Wall Street thought that this was a foolish idea. Investors were not so sure, but Huang was convinced that this was the future, and he was right. Machine learning took off and how. And

3:51 Nvidia had the first mover's advantage. It now powers the Mars rovers, autonomous surgery, and Chad GPT. But here's what most people miss about Nvidia. It's not just a chipmaker. It is also a software company and their secret weapon is something called CUDA compute unified device architecture CUDA. It is kind of an operating system for GPUs. If you want to build an AI model today, you need CUDA. And CUDA only runs on Nvidia, which allows Nvidia to dominate the market. It builds the chip and it builds the system it runs on. Let's also tell you about the man behind all of this, Jensen Huang. His company may be number one, but Huang has an

4:38 employee ID of number three. He gave the first two to his co-founders, and he's become a cult figure in Silicon Valley. Journalists compare him to both Steve Jobs and Taylor Swift in the same breath. At AI conferences, he is a headliner. His presentations are more like concerts. Nvidia earnings reports now have watch parties. People tune in just for the hype. But of course, it's not a bed of roses. Earlier this year, Nvidia lost $600 billion in market value. That too in just one session. $600 billion lost. The reason was a Chinese AI startup called Deepseek. It developed a rival AI model. This model also uses Nvidia chips, by the way. And yet, the company bled money. And then there's China. Of course, the US has heavily restricted

5:24 chip sales to Beijing, and this has hit Nvidia. The company lost out on $2.5 billion in additional revenue from what they would have sold to to China and Chinese companies. Now, Nvidia cannot sell in China. And finally, there are other competitors, the likes of AMD, advanced micro devices. It is challenging Nvidia's dominance. Interestingly, the person running this company, AMD, is Jensen Huang's cousin, Lisa, who? Yes, family dinners get competitive. But here's the existential question. What happens when a company reaches $4 trillion? What happens when they are the market? Where do they go

6:10 from there? Because history shows tech empires rise fast and fall faster. Just ask IBM or Intel. Intel was once a dominant force in the semiconductor industry. Now it's not even in the footnotes. Does Nvidia face a similar future? Well, the fact is no company, no one is truly invincible. But here's where Nvidia might be different from Intel. It's not just building a product. It is also building infrastructure. In the 20th century, power belonged to oil companies. In the early 2000s, it shifted to internet platforms. They said data was the new oil. Today, power lies with whoever controls intelligence. And right now, that is Nvidia.

6:58 This company is not just making chips. It is shaping wars. It is retooling medicine and redrawing global power equations. That is too much power and too much money in the hands of a private company. We say it's both thrilling and terrifying. First post now available in nine languages on YouTube. English stands at 36ion, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish. Beautiful. Go to settings. Click on audio track and

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