Nvidia is little known despite having a market value of $3 trillion

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon AND Google were the top four global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They are also four of the five most valuable companies in the world.

The other is Nvidiawhich for a time this week, passed Microsoft to become the world’s largest company by market capitalization.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it hit $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia didn’t even make the 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s latest list, which is populated by companies such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney AND Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic valuation surge — the stock is up nearly 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 generative artificial intelligence boom and, more broadly, by noise on AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of major technology companies are the main buyers of its chips.

Nvidia’s speed of ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combine to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its Wall Street allure. Number 100 on Interbrand’s 2023 list is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at number 99.

“As a product company recently transitioning to a global stage, Nvidia has not had the time, nor the dedicated resources, to change its brand role and strengthen its brand to protect future revenues, ” Greg Silverman, global director of brand economics at Interbrand. said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that “its weak brand strength will limit its value, regardless of the heights of the market caps.”

An Nvidia spokesman declined to comment.

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the last three quarters. For fiscal year 2025, revenue is expected to nearly double from a year ago to more than $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which accounted for 85% of sales last quarter, are installed in massive facilities and typically require an expensive team of data science and supercomputing experts to configure them for efficiently created AI software.

In contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers around the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is widely known for its Windows and Office software. No. 3 Amazon tries to be the consumer’s one-stop shop, and No. 4 Google is, for many, the gateway to the Internet.

Interbrand’s top 10 rounds out the South Korean electronics giant Samsungalong with three car companies (ToyotaMercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola AND Nike.

Further down the list, at number 24, is rival Nvidia Intel, which is best known for creating the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. even Hewlett Packard Enterprisea company that builds servers, was ranked number 91.

However, a competitive survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up with its peers.

In a ranking of the world’s 100 most valuable brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, jumping 18 places from its previous survey. The overall value of the brand increased by 178% in one year to a valuation of approximately $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that sell primarily to other businesses to come up with a total brand value estimate.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as important and meaningful to that B2B buyer looking to make big, big purchases at home for their company as Apple is to the consumer buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a household name to your parents — or your kids — it resonates in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hardcore gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s main focus was on designing chips that could quickly draw digital triangles, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D gaming.

For years, Nvidia, its GeForce brand and green logo were known to the kind of people who tuned their PCs to run the most advanced games. Nvidia supplies the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units worldwide.

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy advertising campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chip makers. In the most recent quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion in revenue, or 10% of total sales, growing 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips must go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a hardware company such as vein or HPE. These 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.

However, Nvidia’s name recognition is growing rapidly. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most-held stock, according to data compiled and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s 2023 Top 100 list, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness has quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it comes time for the next ranking. , Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say her name, a topic that has been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

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