Chipmaker Nvidia joins the trillion-dollar club

May 30 (UPI) -- With shares flirting with $410 each on the tech-heavy NASDAQ on Tuesday, chipmaker Nvidia became the first company of its kind to reach the $1 trillion market cap.

Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said last week that his company had "a trillion dollars" in installed capacity across the global and was moving quickly in the "race to apply generative AI into every product, service and business process."

AI systems such as ChatGPT require thousands of chips to complete the machine learning required to prep the systems over extended periods of time. And competition in the industry is fierce - Internet giant Google in April said it was entering the race with its own AI supercomputer.

"There's a war going on out there in AI, and Nvidia today is the only arms dealer out there," Srini Pajjuri, a managing director at investment firm Raymond James, was quoted by Yahoo Finance as saying. "So as a result we're seeing this huge jump in revenues."

Nvidia is emerging as the clear leader, and becomes the first chip maker to reach the $1 trillion threshold. Huang said during the Computex forum in Taipei on Monday that faster computing and artificial intelligence represent the "reinvention" of the computer.

"We're now at the tipping point of a new computing era with accelerated computing and AI that's been embraced by almost every computing and cloud company in the world," he said.

Nvidia's ascent puts it in the same field as Apple, which in 2018 became the first company to reach the trillion-dollar market cap. It's since been joined by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Nvidia shares were up 5% as of 10:30 a.m. EDT to trade at $408.80.