Nvidia Corporation

Nvidia briefly touched $4 trillion market capitalization in July 2025—the first company ever to reach this threshold—before settling at $4.4 trillion by year-end. This 267% growth from $1.2 trillion in early 2024 wasn't gradual appreciation but explosive phase transition driven by AI chip demand. The company controls 88% of discrete GPU sales for high-performance computing, creating trophic cascades where removing Nvidia would collapse the AI industry's computational food chain.

Yet Nvidia manufactures nothing. Every H100, A100, and Blackwell chip is fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan, making AI advancement dependent on a single geographic chokepoint. This keystone dependency represents strategic brilliance, not weakness: by outsourcing $20+ billion in fabrication capital expenditure, Nvidia invested instead in CUDA software, AI libraries, and developer ecosystems that created 10x programmability advantages over competitors. When Microsoft, Amazon, and Google each spend billions on data centers, they buy Nvidia chips not because alternatives don't exist but because switching would require retraining thousands of engineers on inferior toolchains.

The company's $44.1 billion revenue in fiscal Q1 2025 (ending April) came mostly from data center chips, with gross margins exceeding 70%—pricing power that exists only when you control the narrow part of an hourglass ecosystem. But revenue growth is decelerating from 114% in FY2025 to projected 60% in FY2026, revealing the metabolic ceiling: even exponential markets eventually saturate. Nvidia's challenge isn't competition—it's whether AI demand can sustain infrastructure buildout that already consumes more capital than most industries generate in profit.