Nvidia briefly overtakes Apple as world's most valuable company—it began in a breakfast booth at Denny's

Chipmaker Nvidia temporarily dethroned Apple as the most valuable company in the world on Monday — another stop on the company's unlikely journey from startup to tech giant.

Nvidia shares rose Monday morning, boosting its market value to $3.38 trillion by the afternoon, surpassing Apple's $3.35 trillion market cap. The news came just days after S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that Nvidia is replacing rival chipmaker Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a 30-member index that's often viewed as a key indicator of the U.S. stock market.

By Monday evening, Apple bounced back to the top with a $3.38 trillion market value, compared to Nvidia's $3.34 trillion.

Nvidia's dominant market position, driven largely by its development of powerful computer chips that can power artificial intelligence models, is lightyears from its roots as a 3D graphics company for video games.

Co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang and his two friends, engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, started the business in 1993 while eating at a Denny's restaurant in San Jose, California, Huang told CBS' "60 Minutes." in April.

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Huang was 30 years old, married and a father of two when inspiration struck him at the same restaurant where he once worked as a busboy at age 15, he said.

"We came right here to this Denny's, sat right back there, and the three of us decided to start the company," said Huang. "Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, nor did they. None of us knew how to do anything."

From breakfast booth to booming business

By 1995, Nvidia had developed a low-cost computer processing chip called the NV1, according to the company's website. This helped them snag a partnership with video game company Sega to help make its games accessible on personal computers.

But the chip was a failure, too "technically poor" to render any significant level of graphics, Huang told graduating students in a May 2023 commencement speech at National Taiwan University. The mistake nearly pushed the company into bankruptcy, until Huang negotiated a contract buyout with Sega that provided Nvidia with a financial lifeline and resources to develop the NV1′s successor.

The new chip, called the RIVA 128, debuted in 1997 and quickly became a commercial success. By the 2010s, Nvidia was diversifying beyond the video game industry to laptop computers, automobiles, AI and even cloud-based computing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

When AI exploded onto the global business landscape, driven at least partially by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, Nvidia was well-positioned to take advantage. Its shares have returned more than 500% since the start of 2023, Goldman Sachs reported in April. If you invested $10,000 in the company 25 years ago, you'd have over $32 million, CNBC calculated last month.

The secret to Huang's success

The billionaire CEO never anticipated that Nvidia's diversification — driven by its development of a particularly powerful graphics processing chip — would prepare it for the age of artificial intelligence, he said.

"That was luck founded by vision," said Huang. "We invented this capability and then one day, the researchers that were creating deep learning discovered this architecture. Because this architecture turned out to be perfect for them. ... Perfect for AI."

That particular kind of optimism is a crucial factor to leading a successful life and career, according to cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot.

"Optimism changes subjective reality," Sharot said in a 2012 TED Talk. "The way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it. But it also changes objective reality. It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success."

As for Huang, the 61-year-old marveled at how a sit-down at Denny's launched a tech giant, and said that dedication will take you far.

"This is the most extraordinary thing," he said. "That a normal dishwasher busboy could grow up to be this. There's no magic. It's just 61 years of hard work every single day. I don't think there's anything more than that."

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