Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang,speaks at the Supermicro keynote presentation during the Computex conference in Taipei on June 1, 2023.Walid Berrazeg | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesFollowing last year’s market route in tech stocks, all of the industry’s big names have rebounded in 2023. But one company has far outshined them all: Nvidia.Driven by an over decade-long head start in the kind of artificial intelligence chips and software now coveted across Silicon Valley, Nvidia shares are up 180% this year, beating every other member of the S&P 500. The next biggest gainer in the index is Facebook parent Meta, which is up 151% at Friday’s close.Nvidia is now valued at over $1 trillion, making it the fifth-most valuable U.S. company, behind only tech behemoths Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet.While Nvidia doesn’t carry the household name of its mega-cap tech peers, its core technology is the backbone of the hottest new product that’s quickly threatening to disrupt everything from education and media to finance and customer service. That would be ChatGPT.OpenAI’s viral chatbot, funded heavily by Microsoft, along with AI models from a handful of well-financed startups, all rely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) to run. They’re …
