Nvidia is a little-known company despite its market cap exceeding $3 trillion

apple, Microsoft, Amazon And Google They were the leading four global brands at the end of 2023, according to consultancy Interbrand. They are also four of the five most valuable companies in the world.

The other is NvidiaFor a period this week, it overtook Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market value.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day drop), Nvidia couldn't even crack the top 100 most popular names on Interbrand's latest list, which includes companies like McDonald's, Starbucks, Disney And Netflix.

Nvidia's historic rise in value — with the stock up nearly ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for the graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative AI, and, more broadly, by the hype around AI. Nvidia has more than 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge technology companies are major buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia's rise and its relative lack of consumer connection along the way combine to set the 31-year-old company's brand recognition on Main Street apart from its appeal on Wall Street. Number 100 on Interbrand's 2023 list is Japanese camera maker Canon, while Dutch camera maker Heineken is ranked 99th.

“As a product company recently moving onto the global stage, Nvidia did not have the time, nor devote the resources, to change its brand role and strengthen its brand to protect future revenues,” Greg Silverman, global director of brand economics at Interbrand, said in an email. Silverman added that the risk facing Nvidia is that “its weak brand strength will limit its value, despite its rising market value.”

A Nvidia spokesman declined to comment.

Nvidia's annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to nearly double from the previous year to more than $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company's data center GPUs, which accounted for 85% of sales last quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI programs.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers around the world. Microsoft, which ranked second, is the enterprise sales giant, but it's known far and wide for its Windows and Office software. Amazon, ranked third, seeks to be a one-stop-shop for consumers, while Google, ranked fourth, is for many people the front door to the Internet.

Rounding out Interbrand's top 10 is the South Korean electronics giant SamsungIn addition to three automobile companies (ToyotaAnd Mercedes-Benz BMW), coca cola And Nike.

At the bottom of the list, in 24th place, is competitor Nvidia Intel Corporation, which is best known for putting the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. until Hewlett-Packard Companya company that builds servers, ranked number 91 on the list.

However, a competitor survey showed that Nvidia's brand value is catching up with its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published by Kantar BrandZ this month, Nvidia fell to sixth place, jumping 18 places from its previous survey. The total value of the brand jumped by 178% within a year to reach an estimated $202 billion. Kantar surveys institutional buyers to evaluate brands that sell primarily to other companies to come up with an overall estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is as relevant and meaningful to a B2B buyer looking to make large, major purchases within their company as Apple is to a consumer buying an iPad or Mac,” Mark Glovski, chief brand strategist at Kantar, told CNB. bad.

And while Nvidia may not be a household name to your parents — or your kids — it resonates in a certain corner of the consumer world. Just ask your gamer friend.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, artificial intelligence was an emerging field. The company's primary focus was designing chips that could quickly draw digital triangles, a key capability that led to a significant expansion of 3D gaming.

For many years, Nvidia, its GeForce brand, and its green logo were well known to the type of people who modified their PCs to run the most advanced games. Nvidia supplies the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped more than 140 million units worldwide.

Unlike Intel, Nvidia has never put its name in front of consumers with flashy advertising campaigns. Gaming is now just a nice side gig for chip makers. In the most recent quarter, its revenue was $2.6 billion, or 10% of total sales, up 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia's top products, companies and organizations competing for their AI chips have to go through an extensive pricing and selling process, often through a computer hardware company, such as Dale or HPE. These vendors sell complete systems, including memory, central processor, and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent access to Nvidia through a cloud provider rather than build their own server farms.

However, the popularity of the Nvidia name is growing rapidly. Among individual investors, Nvidia emerged as the most widely owned stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

Although the name was not on Interbrand's 2023 Top 100 list, company data shows that awareness of its brand has quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it comes time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Perhaps by then people will know how to pronounce her name, a topic that has been a source of discussion on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

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