It’s NVIDIA. No E.
Even in this market, Nvidia dominates. On the Steam hardware survey the first discrete AMD video card is at #28 with the RX 6600. There’s a few non-Nvidia entries before that but they’re all integrated graphics (like Intel Xe or UHD) bundled inside the CPU rather than dedicated video cards.
To be clear, the Nvidia’s market price is very very AI driven but, even in the smaller consumer video card space, they still hold much of the market (75% and that number includes CPU integrated graphics)
And raw marketshare aside, their cards are just better. DLSS (their ML upscaling and frame extrapolation system) dramatically boosts framerate with only a minor loss in visual fidelity. It’s quite a bit better than AMD and Intel’s equivalents. One more thing they took a risk on that really paid off.
GeForce Now, their cloud streaming graphics card, is another fantastic service (and big risk), succeeding where OnLive, PS Now, xCloud, and especially Stadia all failed.
It used to be that ATI and Nvidia would leapfrog each other every generation or two. But Nvidia has dominated for so long now that AMD and Intel gave up trying to compete and mostly cater to the budget and casual segments now, and even then, only barely. Nvidia dominates everything else, especially the high end.
It’s a bit different on consoles though, since AMD’s integrated graphics experience there often gives them an advantage for that form factor. But the consoles have been quite stagnant for a while, and PC gaming is now quite a bit ahead.
That’s in the nature of the game I think, Consoles being a whole package (nobody changes the video card in their PS5) stagnate and the improvements are made in the PC area, then a new generation of consoles appear that mostly gets to where the PC has been for a time, and immediately starts stagnating.
Yep. As absurd as $4.5 trillion sounds (and is), we seem to be in a bubble right now, and there are lots of companies with a valuation to earnings in the hundreds. It’s right that NVidia is the most valuable public company, they just happen to have an inflated valuation, the same as most other tech stock.
Not the same though. 1.5 to 2 times greater for both trailing and forward P/E than the information tech sector overall.
Fear of missing out is just way larger than fear of loss at this point in time. Maybe especially among those who missed out on the big growth of past tech gorillas because rationally they looked overvalued.
It is also what is driving companies glomming on to AI ahead of really understanding what its effective use cases for them are. They are deathly afraid to be the company left behind, of missing out. They don’t even need to know of what.
The OP is based on the assumption that rational analysis drives prices but it definitely does not in the short to medium term, and maybe not even in the longer term.
I guess it’s just a volatile time. More people than ever able to trade, with lots of people trying to buy the dip. The US heavily invested towards tech stocks and crypto. And an openly grifting president, who also often tacos.
In this backdrop, Nvidia looks like a safe, sensible choice. At least for a short term investment.
Tacos?
The acronym TACO, which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” This acronym gained popularity in 2025 in financial and political circles to describe Donald Trump’s tendency to threaten harsh tariffs and tough policies but then retract or delay them under pressure, especially when markets react negatively.
TACO - Political term of endearment for Trump. Trump Always Chickens Out.
Refers to his vacillations on tariff deadlines and percentages.
Ninja’d by PastTense - ‘Curses, foiled again.’
Yes and I’ve seen some analyses (eg the economist) arguing that TACO is taking us to ever more dangerous territory.
Because trump is relying on the market, essentially, to tell him an action is stupid, but the market response is muted by expectations of TACO. So we go to the next level of batshit.
Anyway…I dont want to make it another Trump thread, just finishing the thought 
Hmm, between tacos and covfefes, one could start a whole presidential food truck… heated by Nvidia GPUs, of course.
Back on topic now!
Don’t assume that every one that buys stocks, even Nvidia, thinks about the purchase in the same way. Categorically there are two primary different types of investors, but actual motivations of investors are numerous.
The two primary types are long-term investors and traders. At the current price for Nvidia, most people buying the stock are traders. The long term investors got in a while ago, although some people may still see the long term value being higher than the current market price. Traders believe that speculative value of the stock still has room to run up. And they generally have an exit price that they will sell at when the stock reaches that level. Even if they believe that the current stock is overvalued, they believe that there are other suckers out there that will continue to buy it at even higher values.
An interesting aspect of this (at least to me) is that the largest holders of Nvidia stock are institutional funds (Vanguard owns almost 10% of it, with their Total Stock Market Fund owning 3%). But they are basically agnostic about the price of the stock - they just buy the market-cap weight of it with any inflows to the fund.
The actual price is set by the traders, even if they are not the largest holders of the stock.
And personally, even if at a gut level I think Nvidia is overpriced, I’m still buying it every two weeks at that price in my retirement account. Because who am I to know what the right price is?
I may be the only one who clicked on this thread thinking, “well, they make nice skin care products, but yeah, why would they be more valuable than Clinique or Mary Kay?”
Emily Litella voice: Never mind.
Carry on.
This is a great point about the US stock market overall. 401k participation rates climbed to record highs over the last 15 years. Net of required minimum distributions by retirees, monthly 401k contributions in the US are approximatelly $50 billion…$600 billion of new capital being invested in the stock market evenly spread throughout the year, without regard to market conditions, geopolitical issues, whatever the hell is going on in Washington, and without regard to whether people think the market is overheated or overpriced.
I believe this is why we saw such a prolonged stock market rally throughout the teens. Because this level of new investment mutes whatever trading sentiment that is going on. It won’t offset the effect of a global pandemic, or tariff day! But we are seeing faster recoveries in the market than we used to.
And I think it will continue to be a positive influence on market performance. Could things happen to change that? Of course…but it would require a change in broad retirement investment behavior.
I would caution this calculation slightly by pointing out that 401K contributions can be invested in bond or money market funds as well as equity funds.
Still, that’s a lot of money flowing into the stock market, and to the extent that it’s flowing into into low-expense index funds, its boosting the stocks in those indices to a greater extent than the broader market. To an extent, it is also propping up the values of privately held companies who look for comparisons with similar public companies to value themselves.
If an equal amount were going into pensions, which also get invested, the effect on the market would be small. That’s a different world from the one where we live.
My concern with index funds is exactly as you say. They don’t seem as broadly representative as one might think, especially with the outsize contribution from stocks like Nvidia. They definitely have advantages in being cheap, though.
The reception for Chat Gpt 5 , after a lot of hype, was mixed at best and it will be interesting if that leads to the AI hype wave cresting which in turn leads to pressure on NVidia stock. So far at least it doesn’t seem to have happened.
GPT-5 was underwhelming, true, and many of the OpenAI releases of the last few years have only been tiny, incremental improvements (if even that). But there are so many other companies involved now, across not just chatbots but also image/music/3D etc., and pioneering uses in other fields. It feels like we’re just getting started, and the tech is in its infancy…
Ten years ago, people thought what we have today would’ve been impossible, or would’ve taken decades at least. Five years ago, people were laughing at it. Now it’s actually impacting the economy and jobs — for better or worse. I don’t think even the dotcom bubble had such a crazy trajectory. It makes the crypto bubble look like a minor bump.
Even if transformers will soon peak/plateau, there’s still going to be a long tail of development and research from the bazillions of dollars already spent, and that will alone will have a few years of momentum (just like even today there are still crypto companies around).
It does look like new investment (hiring, data center development, etc.) is slowing down, though… at least until the next big advancement.