Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is worth an estimated $125 billion thanks to a sharp rise in stock.
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tHe stumbled his growth While artificial intelligence is casting billionaires and unicorn gags, chip giant Nvidia remains among the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom for all possibilities.
The company hit the $50 billion Chinese AI chip market after the Trump administration controlled exports to H20 chips. The stocks were temporarily attracting attention earlier this year after the launch of China's Darkhorse Deepseek's popular AI model sparked a panic sale.
Despite external and internal challenges, the $3.5 trillion (market capitalization) Juggernaut continues to capitalize on the global demand for AI infrastructure. In its latest quarterly revenue in May, Nvidia beat the expectations of Wall Street analysts, reporting revenue of $440.6 billion, up 69% from a year ago.
A large portion of its business growth, $39.1 billion, comes from operating data centers as the company plans to build “AI factories” in the US and internationally, with billions of people around the world running AI tools like ChatGpt. In late May, Nvidia said it would provide Stargate UAE, a joint project with Openai, Oracle and others with strong silicon chips to build a 1 gigawatt “computing cluster” on Abu Dhabi's AI campus.
Such projects helped push the company to the top 100 at Forbes' Global 2000, which ranks the world's largest public companies. There are currently 63 spots from last year, and it is at 63 spots thanks to strong business growth spurred by the widespread use of generator AI. The company is now like a large-scale technology conglomerate such as Tencent (No. 37) and Taiwan Semiconductors (No. 38). Global 2000 uses data from the last 12 months as of April 25, 2025 to equally measure market value, revenue, profits and assets.
Even as AI companies move from training large language models to building applications on top of it, they will need to steadily supply Nvidia's powerful silicon chips called graphics processing units (GPUs). Additionally, a new so-called “inference AI model” that takes a step-by-step approach to answer complex problems will consume 100 times more computing resources and increase the demand for NVIDIA hardware.
Nvidia is a market leader, but other companies are growing too. Micron, a semiconductor company that builds memory and data storage products, jumps over 400 spots on the list, and is currently on No. 228, with Korean memory chip provider SK Hynix Inc ranked 155th at 419 spots.
However, not all semiconductor companies benefit from AI Frenzy. Silicon Valley's stubborn Inter, now at No. 488, dropped 381 spots this year at Forbes' Global 2000. The company has struggled after a series of hardships, including declining revenue, leadership challenges and losing market share to rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and ARM Holdings. In December 2024, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger resigned and was replaced by Lip-Bu Tan in March 2025. In April, the company stated its plans to fire 20% of its staff, Bloomberg reported.
The biggest tech companies, such as Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet, all have placed huge bets on artificial intelligence, throwing billions of dollars, developing AI models for users, and attracting the best engineers to build products. All four of these companies are one of the top 20 in the Global 2000. Korean conglomerate Samsung is the only high-tech giant based overseas in the top 20, ranked 19th this year.
One of the new AI beneficiaries to watch is CoreWeave. It was released in March, lending the power of cloud computing to its customers. This year, it first appeared on the list at No. 1,799, and could rise rapidly. Although there is no profit yet, after compiling data for this year's Global 2000 on April 25th, it reported $982 million in first quarter revenue, up 420% compared to the first quarter of the previous year, and the stock price rose 250%.
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