Nvidia overtakes Microsoft to become biggest company in the world

An AI tech chip manufacturer has just surpassed Microsoft, making it the biggest and most valuable company in the world.

AI tech chip manufacturer Nvidia has just surpassed Microsoft, making it the biggest and most valuable company in the world.

On Wednesday morning, just past 5am AEST, Nvidia reached a market capitalisation of $5.1 trillion ($US3.4 trillion).

It marked the first time the tech giant beat Microsoft, which had slipped down to a value of $4.99 trillion ($US3.32 trillion) in the same trading day.

Earlier this month, Nvidia overtook Apple, which currently has a market cap of $4.94 trillion ($US3.29 trillion).

Nvidia’s shares rose by 3.5 per cent by the end of the trading day at nearly $136, while Microsoft dropped slightly, cementing its position as the number one company.

This added more than $154 billion to Nvidia’s market cap in the space of a day.

Nvidia has been riding a high all year, with its stock surging by an unprecedented 180 per cent. Meanwhile, Microsoft has had a more moderate climb of 19 per cent.

Nvidia is now more valuable than any company in the world. Picture: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America/AFP

Nvidia has been in business for 30 years but it’s name isn’t as well known to consumers, as it isn’t quite as customer facing as businesses like Apple or Microsoft.

Nvidia’s US CEO and founder Jensen Huang established Nvidia in 1993 on his 30th birthday to bring three-dimensional graphics into the gaming and multimedia markets.

The Taiwanese-born tech whiz — who moved to Kentucky at age 9 — reportedly dreamt up the chip giant alongside fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, where he had worked part-time before getting his masters degree from Stanford University.

It was mostly an obscure business, though well known in the gaming world because of its GPU devices.

But in recent years, Nvidia branched into the AI space with its chips, and has enjoyed massive demands for its products.

That growth was driven by the surge of interest in artificial intelligence and the expected demand for its computer chips that process it.

Nvidia has had an incredible rise to power.

In a sign of its eye-watering rise to power, only last year did Nvidia manage to reach a market cap of $US1 trillion.

It was just shy of the exclusive $1 club.

But now it has joined the ranks of elite businesses and overtaken them all.

The $US1 trillion club, currently only occupied by five companies: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.com, Alphabet (Google), and Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state oil giant.