Will Nvidia Become the Next Cisco?

Welcome to Silicon Valley, where iconic companies come and go

Photo by Zetong Li on Unsplash

Nvidia’s success has been nothing short of phenomenal. A decade ago, it was just a leading player in a specific technical field. Now it stands at the heart of a groundbreaking revolution. With its GPUs at the core of AI and machine learning, Nvidia has become an essential provider for industries ranging from autonomous vehicles, data centers, robotics, gaming, and high-performance computing.

With its soaring stock price, skepticism is beginning to creep in. What has changed to its technology before and after the pandemic? Not much. Its meteoric rise is driven less by breathtaking innovation and more by a combination of luck and the influx of money. Some even draw parallels to Cisco, predicting that Nvidia will follow the same path.

Cisco indeed is an infamous cautionary tale. It once reigned Silicon Valley supreme, embodying tech dominance as the linchpin of the internet boom. In 2000, Cisco briefly became the world’s most valuable company. Now it has a market cap of $235.78 billion, less than 10% of Nvidia’s $3.43 trillion.

Would Nvidia end up like Cisco? In Silicon Valley, nothing is ever certain. Iconic companies have come and gone. Industry giants can quickly become dinosaurs. However, in my opinion…