The trillion-dollar company club has just got a surprising new member: Nvidia.

Best known for making graphics cards for computer gamers, Nvidia's share price has nearly tripled since January 2023. So how did this maker of neon-strobing gaming equipment become a stock market darling overnight? Two words: artificial intelligence.

It turns out that, largely by coincidence, the specific type of computing power required to make hyper-realistic games run smoothly is also well suited to processing AI queries. The complex calculations necessary to throw pixels onto a screen fast enough to fool the human eye – called matrix operations – are exactly the kind of calculation an AI neural network requires while "learning" from the enormous piles of data on which these systems are "trained".