Nvidia (NVDA 6.18%) has been on an incredible run over the last year. The artificial intelligence (AI) leader's share price has soared roughly 240% over the last 12 months, making it the best-performing "Magnificent Seven" stock across the stretch. The explosive performance has pushed the company's market cap to roughly $1.96 trillion, and it now ranks as the world's fourth-most valuable company.
AI has accelerated Nvidia's incredible transformation
Nvidia was founded in 1993 and got its start as a designer of graphics-processing-units (GPUs) used for video games and other visually intensive applications. The company's first GPUs released in 1999 and immediately delivered major leaps forward in graphical capabilities, but the rise of advanced processors in data centers has been the true driver of the AI frontrunner's incredible growth.
At the beginning of the last decade, Nvidia began focusing more on designing GPUs for data centers. It was a move that would go on to dramatically reshape the company's business and lead to major leaps forward in cloud and technologies. For more context, check out the chart below, which tracks the progression of the processing leader's business groupings and revenue by segment.
Source: Statista.
The advanced processing capabilities of the company's GPUs makes them well suited for cloud technologies. In the company's 2023 fiscal year, which closed at the end of calendar 2022, its compute and networking segment accounted for the majority of revenue for the first time. Growth for the segment exploded from there onward.
With most large-scale AI applications currently being run through the cloud, Nvidia's most advanced processors have become the foundational hardware that is underpinning the AI revolution.
Nvidia currently controls roughly 90% of the market for the kinds of advanced GPUs used for AI and accelerated computing applications. Now that demand for these technologies is skyrocketing, the semiconductor specialist's sales, earnings, and share price have been surging in tandem.
