If Nvidia Keeps Rising Like This, It Will Be Bigger Than the Global Economy

It’s not a household name quite yet, but anyone who follows the stock market knows at least a little about Nvidia.

The company is the wonder of the year, a stock by which all others are measured. Nvidia designs the chips that make artificial intelligence work, and because A.I. is being hailed as the most important technological development since the internet, Nvidia shares have been rocketing since last year.

I’m not qualified to assess how important — or how dangerous — A.I. will one day become, but I do pay close attention to the stock market, which values Nvidia at more than $2.2 trillion, making it the third-largest public company in the world behind Microsoft and Apple.

Enthusiasm for A.I. is raising the share prices not only of Nvidia, but also of many other tech companies that are believed to be imbued with the technology’s potential, including Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet as well as other chipmakers like AMD, Taiwan Semiconductor and Intel.

But the blistering rate of Nvidia’s gains — an increase of about 290 percent over the past 12 months — has me and many Wall Street analysts wondering how sustainable this run is. The answer has implications for the entire market.