Nvidia already qualifies one excellent corporate example of Ugly Duckling from the early 21st century business and technology college textbooks. Of course, "ugly" or "duckling" in itself is another excellent way to call an organization pioneering a new computing paradigm that already generates billions in annual revenue.
Hardly anyone was also surprised when the company reported another 122% surge in overall revenue for its second fiscal 2024 quarter fueled by outsized demand for its H100 and H200 Hopper GPUs and the associated networking offerings. Common opinion labels Nvidia as the biggest proxy for everything AI with its overpromise/underdeliver nature reflected in the observable daily volatility of the stock. At the same time markets often reveal their reactive nature by assigning value only after some previously obscured information becomes common knowledge. In other words, the processes that led to Nvidia's rise as a trillion-dollar company were gathering speed well before the market began reacting with a 10x surge in the company's market cap spurred by the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
One interesting thing about those processes is that in addition to being intrinsically robust and far-reaching, they run deeper than technology and product waves, be it even AI itself. One example: every entity that can afford the capital and talent investment, is out to build its own data centers. You need to own your data and be able to build on top of it at will if you want to escape walled-garden constraints. As a technology leader, you don't need Elon Musk's Tesla or xAI or Mark Zuckerber's Meta to tell you that, even though you can certainly take them as excellent examples.
Never before there was such a diverse group of entities feeling the pressure to invest into data and computing sovereignty. Their data centers need to be sustainable, efficient and performant and they turn to Nvidia to make this possible through their unified accelerated computing architecture. If you trust a partner's technology leadership you invest into it in order to build your own technology leadership.
Once perceived as a lucrative but niche chip provider for geek gamers and crypto miners, Nvidia worked very hard to become the 3-trillion USD Wild Swan of accelerated computing (not necessarily a black one). The Swan soared on the back of multiple tailwinds which are here to stay. It took the world only 15 years to realize this and a few more quarters for the markets to react.