7 Charts That Explain 2024

In many ways, artificial intelligence defined 2024.

Nvidia’s perch as the dominant seller of the graphics processing units that power much of AI propelled it past $3 trillion in market capitalization, making it the world’s second most valuable company as of Dec. 27, trailing only Apple. Despite a growing legion of rivals and would-be rivals (see our AI Chip Database), Nvidia’s sales actually grew faster than those of Advanced Micro Devices, its main competitor in GPUs.

For Nvidia’s customers, those sales translate into soaring expenditures for building data centers to create and run AI models. Capital expenditures at four big tech companies rose 50% through the first nine months of the year, to more than $150 billion. One benefit of all that computing power: The cost of using a large language model is plunging, down more than 85% from the start of last year.