Good morning. Nvidia surpassed Microsoft on Tuesday as the world’s most valuable company, reaching a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft’s $3.32 trillion.
In the first week of June, CEO Jensen Huang saw his company reach a market cap of $3 trillion for the first time, surpassing Apple. The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker, whose highly sought-after semiconductors help power AI-related computing tasks in massive data centers, has dominated the market. Over the past year, Nvidia shares are up more than 200%.
“The godfather of AI, Jensen and Nvidia are leading this AI revolution, and it’s a race to a $4 trillion market cap – with Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple vying for the No. 1 spot,” said Dan Ives, managing partner at Wedbush Securities , told me on Tuesday.
Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. About 34.5% of the S&P 500’s market cap gain so far this year can be attributed to Nvidia, according to Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. Fortune Previously reported.
On May 22, Nvidia reported results for the quarter ending April 28, and there were no signs of slowing down. On the earnings call, Nvidia EVP and CFO Colette Kress said revenue for the quarter was $26 billion, up 18% sequentially and up 262% year-over-year, and well above the company’s guidance of $24 billion.
“Colette Kress’ CFO leadership at Nvidia has been instrumental in Nvidia’s success on Wall Street and is key to Jensen’s vision,” Ives told me. “She is highly respected both internally at Nvidia and across the technology industry.”
Kress joined Nvidia as CFO in 2013 after nearly 25 years in various financial roles at major technology companies. She was previously CFO of Cisco’s Business Technology and Operations Finance organization and spent thirteen years at Microsoft, including four years as CFO of the server and tools division.
I had the chance to sit down with Kress in 2022 and we discussed how the rest of her career prepared her for the move to Nvidia.
This is what she told me:
“My career background has served me well. When I started at Nvidia, it was the smallest company I had ever worked for. It’s gotten quite big, but the focus is on how do you think about the future and make sure we’re ready to scale?
“Some techniques and processes need to be transformed over time as the business scales. How do we digitize manual processes? Our rapid growth has made that central to us. Particularly in my role as a leader of the financial sector, and of the sister and brother organizations around me, I expect them to say, ‘Hey, we need to review a process, how the functions work together, to deliver digital solutions. to create.’
“When I look back on my career of more than thirty years, it’s fascinating that there are so many different ways of doing things that never existed – even at some of the largest companies I’ve worked at in the past.”
She now works at the largest company. And she’s clearly a big reason why.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
