Nvidia remains a little-known brand despite briefly passing Apple, Microsoft in market cap
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang makes a speech at an event at COMPUTEX forum in Taipei, Taiwan June 4, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.
The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.
But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.
Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.
The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.
“As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue,” Greg Silverman, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”
A spokesperson for Nvidia 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 almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.
The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent 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 software.
By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.
Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.
Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.
Gamers love it
However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.
In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.
“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.
And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.
When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.
For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.
A Nintendo Switch console.
Philip Fong | AFP | Getty Images
Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.
When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.
Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.
And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.
Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.
WATCH: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ should have another good earnings season
The Federal Supreme Court (STF) in Brazil suspends Elon Musk’s social network after it fails to comply with orders from Minister Alexandre de Moraes to block accounts of those being investigated by the Brazilian justice system.
Cris Faga | Nurphoto | Getty Images
X has to pay one last fine before the social network owned by Elon Musk is allowed back online in Brazil, according to a decision out Friday from the country’s top justice, Alexandre de Moraes.
The platform was suspended nationwide at the end of August, a decision upheld by a panel of judges on Sept. 2. Earlier this month, X filed paperwork informing Brazil’s supreme court that it is now in compliance with orders, which it previously defied.
As Brazil’s G1 Globo reported, X must now pay a new fine of 10 million reals (about $2 million) for two additional days of non-compliance with the court’s orders. X’s legal representative in Brazil, Rachel de Oliveira, is also required to pay a fine of 300,000 reals.
The case dates back to April, when de Moraes, the minister of Brazil’s supreme court, known as Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), initiated a probe into Musk and X over alleged obstruction of justice.
Musk had vowed to defy the court’s orders to take down certain accounts in Brazil. He called the court’s actions “censorship,” and railed online against de Moraes, describing the judge as a “criminal” and encouraging the U.S. to end foreign aid to Brazil.
In mid-August, Musk closed down X offices in Brazil. That left his company without a legal representative in the country, a federal requirement for all tech platforms to do business there.
By Aug. 28, de Moraes’ court threatened a ban and fines if X didn’t appoint a legal representative within 24 hours, and if it didn’t comply with takedown requests for accounts the court said had engaged in plots to dox or harm federal agents, among other things.
Earlier this month, the STF froze the business assets of Musk companies, including both X and satellite internet business Starlink, operating in Brazil. The STF said in court filings that it viewed Starlink parent SpaceX and X as companies that worked together as related parties.
Musk wrote in a post on X at that time that, “Unless the Brazilian government returns the illegally seized property of and SpaceX, we will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too.”
On August 29, 2024, in Brazil, the Minister of the Supreme Court, STF Minister Alexandre de Moraes, orders the blocking of the accounts of another company, Starlink, of Elon Musk, to guarantee the payment of fines imposed by the STF due to the lack of representatives of X in Brazil.
Ton Molina | Nurphoto | Getty Images
As head of the STF, de Moraes has long supported federal regulations to rein in hate speech and misinformation online. His views have garnered pushback from tech companies and far-right officials in the country, along with former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters.
Bolsonaro is under investigation, suspected of orchestrating a coup in Brazil after losing the 2022 presidential election to current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
While Musk has called for retribution against de Moraes and Lula, he has worked with and praised Bolsonaro for years. The former president of Brazil authorized SpaceX to deliver satellite internet services commercially in Brazil in 2022.
Musk bills himself as a free speech defender, but his track record suggests otherwise. Under his management, X removed content critical of ruling parties in Turkey and India at the government’s insistence. X agreed to more than 80% of government take-down requests in 2023 over a comparable period the prior year, according to analysis by the tech news site Rest of World.
X faces increased competition in Brazil from social apps like Meta-owned Threads, and Bluesky, which have attracted users during its suspension.
Starlink also faces competition in Brazil from eSpace, a French-American firm that gained permission this year from the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) to deliver satellite internet services in the country.
Lukas Darien, an attorney and law professor at Brazil’s Facex University Center, told CNBC that the STF’s enforcement actions against X are likely to change the way large technology companies will view the court.
“There is no change to the law here,” Darien wrote in a message. “But specifically, big tech companies are now aware that the laws will be applied regardless of the size of a business and the magnitude of its reach in the country.”
Musk and representatives for X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Late Thursday, X Global Government Affairs posted the following statement:
“X is committed to protecting free speech within the boundaries of the law and we recognize and respect the sovereignty of the countries in which we operate. We believe that the people of Brazil having access to X is essential for a thriving democracy, and we will continue to defend freedom of expression and due process of law through legal processes.”
WATCH: X is a financial ‘disaster’
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at the Hope Global Forums annual meeting in Atlanta on Dec. 11, 2023.
Dustin Chambers | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, expects about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue this year, CNBC has confirmed.
The company generated $300 million in revenue last month, up 1,700% since the beginning of last year, and expects to bring in $11.6 billion in sales next year, according to a person close to OpenAI who asked not to be named because the numbers are confidential.
The New York Times was first to report on OpenAI’s financials earlier on Friday after viewing company documents. CNBC hasn’t seen the financials.
OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, is currently pursuing a funding round that would value the company at more than $150 billion, people familiar with the matter have told CNBC. Thrive Capital is leading the round and plans to invest $1 billion, with Tiger Global planning to join as well.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told investors in an email Thursday that the funding round is oversubscribed and will close by next week. Her note followed a number of key departures, most notably technology chief Mira Murati, who announced the previous day that she was leaving OpenAI after six and a half years.
Also this week, news surfaced that OpenAI’s board is considering plans to restructure the firm to a for-profit business. The company will retain its nonprofit segment as a separate entity, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The structure would be more straightforward for investors and make it easier for OpenAI employees to realize liquidity, the source said.
OpenAI’s services have exploded in popularity since the company launched ChatGPT in late 2022. The company sells subscriptions to various tools and licenses its GPT family of large language models, which are powering much of the generative AI boom. Running those models requires a massive investment in Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
The Times, citing an analysis by a financial professional who reviewed OpenAI’s documents, reported that the roughly $5 billion in loses this year are tied to costs for running its services as well as employee salaries and office rent. The costs don’t include equity-based compensation, “among several large expenses not fully explained in the documents,” the paper said.
WATCH: OpenAI has a lot of challengers, says Madrona’s Matt McIlwain
Technology
Alibaba, Tencent rally as Beijing stimulus plans push China’s tech stocks to 13-month high
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports6 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports11 months agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Environment1 year agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway