Nvidia's staying power is the $2 tn question

It surpassed market values of both Amazon.com and Alphabet last week

- Dan Gallagher

Nvidia's next trillion dollars is proving easier than the first.

That doesn't exactly put the ascendant chip maker on Easy Street.

It became the first semiconductor company worth $1 trillion about eight months ago-not long after its 30th birthday. The stock's momentum has continued; Nvidia is now worth just under $1.8 trillion and is the third most valuable U.S. company, after Microsoft and Apple.

It surpassed the market values of both Amazon.com and Google parent Alphabet last week, businesses with far more revenue that share two notable things in commona vital need for Nvidia's chips to power their growing ambitions in artificial intelligence and capital budgets of tens of billions of dollars annually to put toward the effort.

Just how many billions will become abundantly clear Wednesday, when Nvidia reports its fiscal fourth-quarter results.

Based on the company's forecast for the final quarter of the year, those results will show nearly $59 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ended in January-more than double what Nvidia generated in the previous year. None of Nvidia's megacap tech peers-Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and the parent companies of Google and Facebook- ever expanded revenue that fast in a single year from a similar starting point, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Nvidia will become the world's second-largest chip company based on annual revenue, surpassing Intel.