Nvidia spent three decades building a business worth $1 trillion. It spent two years turning itself into a $4 trillion company.

英伟达花了30年时间建立了一个价值1万亿美元的公司，又用了两年时间将自己变成一个价值4万亿美元的公司。

On Thursday, the world’s leading provider of computer chips for artificial intelligence became the first public company worth $4 trillion, after its stock ended the day trading just above $164 a share. It achieved the milestone before an array of better-known tech heavyweights, including Apple and Microsoft.

周四，这家全球领先的人工智能芯片供应商成为首家市值达4万亿美元的上市公司，其股价当日收于每股略高于164美元。它先于苹果和微软等更知名的科技巨头达到了这一里程碑。

Nvidia’s rise is among the fastest in Wall Street history, and a testament to investors’ belief that artificial intelligence will deliver an economic transformation that rivals the Industrial Revolution’s.

英伟达的崛起是华尔街历史上最快的案例之一，证明投资者相信人工智能将带来堪比工业革命的经济变革。

More than any other company, Nvidia jump-started the A.I. frenzy. Jensen Huang, the company’s chief executive, bet a decade ago that chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, would make it possible to build artificial intelligence systems. He poured billions of dollars into software for A.I. developers.

英伟达在引爆人工智能热潮的过程中扮演了关键的角色，这一点没有别的哪家公司能比得上。十年前，公司首席执行官黄仁勋押注名为图形处理器(GPU)的芯片将使构建人工智能系统成为可能。他向人工智能开发者专用软件投入了数十亿美元。

The bet paid off in 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, igniting a frenzied race to develop A.I. systems and products. In recent months, tech titans have showered A.I. experts with $100 million checks and set out to spend tens of billions of dollars on data centers that consume more electricity than a million homes.

这一赌注在2022年得到了回报，当时OpenAI推出了ChatGPT，引发了一场开发人工智能系统和产品的狂热竞赛。近几个月来，科技巨头们向人工智能专家开出了上亿美元的支票，并计划投入数百亿美元建设数据中心，这些数据中心的耗电量超过一百万个家庭。

Nvidia has been the backbone of that build-out. It controls more than 80 percent of the market for the chips used for building A.I. systems. Its biggest customers — and some of the world’s richest men — regularly jockey for the company’s chips to run computers in their data centers.

英伟达一直是这场开发浪潮的中坚力量。在用于构建人工智能系统的芯片市场，它掌控着超过80%的份额。它的最大客户——包括一些全球最富有的人——经常争相抢购英伟达的芯片，以便在各自的数据中心运行计算机。

Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon expect to spend a combined $320 billion this year on infrastructure, with a good part of that flowing to Nvidia. The demand is so great that Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, last year recalled a sushi dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., where he and Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, begged Mr. Huang for more chips.

Meta、微软、Alphabet和亚马逊今年预计将在基础设施上合计投入3200亿美元，其中很大一部分将流向英伟达。需求之强烈，以至于甲骨文联合创始人拉里·埃里森去年回忆起在加州帕洛阿尔托的一顿寿司晚餐，当时他和特斯拉首席执行官埃隆·马斯克一起恳求黄仁勋多给一些芯片。

“Please take our money. Please take our money,” Mr. Ellison recounted saying. “We need you to take more of our money. Please.”

“请收下我们的钱，请收下我们的钱，”埃里森回忆自己当时说。“我们需要你收下更多的钱，拜托了。”

Nvidia’s investors have watched its profits multiply while its net income jumped from $4.4 billion in its 2023 fiscal year to $73.88 billion in its 2025 fiscal year. The company’s market value enjoyed a similarly meteoric rise, surging from $330 billion in the fall of 2022 before ChatGPT’s release to $3.3 trillion last fall.

英伟达的投资者见证了公司利润的成倍增长，其净收入从2023财年的44亿美元飙升至2025财年的738.8亿美元。公司的市值也经历了同样迅猛的增长，从2022年秋季ChatGPT发布前的3300亿美元飙升至去年秋季的3.3万亿美元。

Nvidia’s rise is reminiscent of dot-com era titans like Cisco and Juniper Networks, which built the equipment that ran communications networks for the internet. Cisco’s shares increased more than a thousandfold between its initial public offering in 1990 and 2000, when it briefly became the world’s most valuable company.

英伟达的崛起让人想起互联网泡沫时期的巨头，比如思科和瞻博网络，这些公司打造了支撑互联网通信网络运行的设备。思科的股价在1990年首次公开募股到2000年之间上涨了逾千倍，期间它曾短暂成为全球市值最高的公司。

But Mark Lipacis, a semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI, said Nvidia would have more staying power than those companies. He said Nvidia is to A.I. what Apple has been to smartphones: the dominant player at the forefront of a new computing era. He believes Nvidia could eventually account for 16 percent of the S&P 500, more than double Apple at its peak.

但Evercore ISI的半导体行业分析师马克·利帕西斯表示，英伟达比那些公司更具持久力。他说，英伟达之于人工智能，就像苹果之于智能手机：引领新计算时代的主导者。他认为英伟达最终可能占据标普500指数16%的权重，是苹果巅峰时期的两倍多。

“History tells us that these are 20-year eras,” Mr. Lipacis said. “For Nvidia, the battle is already won.”

“历史告诉我们，这样的时代通常持续20年，”利帕西斯表示。“对于英伟达来说，战斗已经赢了。”

The company’s success has made Mr. Huang, 62, a celebrity in the tech world. Over the past two years, more than 15,000 people have filled a hockey arena in San Jose, Calif., to hear him talk about how he sees the future of A.I. unfolding.

这家公司的成功让62岁的黄仁勋成为科技界的名人。过去两年里，超过1.5万人曾聚集在加州圣何塞的一座曲棍球馆，聆听他对人工智能未来发展的看法。

In the process, he has become one of the world’s richest men. His 3.5 percent stake in Nvidia is worth more than $135 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ, a market research provider.

在此过程中，黄仁勋也成为了全球最富有的人之一。根据市场研究机构标普资本智商的数据，他持有的英伟达3.5%的股份价值超过1350亿美元。

Keeping the $4 trillion valuation is far from guaranteed for the company. There are still pockets of skepticism across Wall Street and Silicon Valley about the potential for artificial intelligence. There are questions about whether businesses will see sufficient return on a technology that is expected to cost $1 trillion to develop.

维持4万亿美元的估值对英伟达来说远非板上钉钉。华尔街和硅谷仍存在对人工智能潜力的质疑声音。人们也在怀疑企业是否能从这项预计耗资1万亿美元开发的技术中获得足够的回报。

Nvidia also faces rising competition. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are all developing in-house A.I. chips that reduce their need for Nvidia. And the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, has been making inroads with its own A.I. products.

英伟达还面临日益激烈的竞争。微软、Alphabet、亚马逊和Meta都在开发自有的人工智能芯片，以减少对英伟达的依赖。而芯片制造商超威半导体(AMD)也凭借自家的人工智能产品取得了一定进展。

Nvidia’s dominance has given rise to government scrutiny. The Justice Department has been investigating Nvidia’s sales practices and acquisitions. In the European Union, Britain, China and South Korea, regulators are looking at how it allocates supplies of its chips and structures its sales of software and hardware.

英伟达的主导地位引起了政府的审视。美国司法部一直在调查英伟达的销售行为和收购活动。在欧盟、英国、中国和韩国，监管机构也在关注其芯片供应分配方式以及软件和硬件销售结构。

The company can also be upended by geopolitical forces. Early this year, its shares fell 17 percent and it lost $600 billion in market value on a single day after the Chinese company DeepSeek claimed it could train a cutting-edge A.I. system with a tiny fraction of the Nvidia chips U.S. companies were using. Investors’ fears proved to be overblown, and Nvidia recovered. But the breakthrough showed the volatility that comes with being an A.I. bellwether.

这家公司也可能因地缘政治因素而遭受冲击。今年年初，在中国公司DeepSeek声称能够用远少于美国公司使用的英伟达芯片数量训练出先进的人工智能系统后，英伟达股价单日暴跌17%，市值蒸发6000亿美元。投资者的担忧最终被证明是夸大了，英伟达股价随后回升。但这一突破也显示了作为人工智能风向标所伴随的市场波动性。

“This market is so huge that there are going to be multiple winners,” said Daniel Newman, the chief executive of Futurum Group, a tech research firm. “Nvidia’s staying power will come down to execution.”

“这个市场非常庞大，将会有多个赢家，”科技研究公司Futurum Group的首席执行官丹尼尔·纽曼表示。“英伟达能否持久领先，关键在于执行力。”