The yellow and red mast, typically erected in the middle of the shopping area's parking lot, shines like a beacon for American motorists. At any time of day or night, there's always a Denny's restaurant to welcome hungry guests. But the one on Berryessa Road, in eastern San José, California, has become the country's most famous, with the same old-fashioned red tables, chairs, and couches found here as in the chain's thousand other diners across the United States. In a discreet corner of this one, above the corner seating, a freshly painted plaque announced: "The booth that launched a $1 trillion company. Congratulations Nvidia! Who knew that an idea started here would change the world?"

The hero of this story, Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, came in person on September 26, 2023, to greet the modest reminder of his painstaking beginnings, as if to better engrave his legacy. "I started out as a dishwasher at Denny's" he often recalls in his speeches, a reminder of his student days. Now, TV cameras crowd around him. It must be said that, along with Elon Musk, he is Silicon Valley's hottest celebrity. One of the richest, too. His company, in which he holds a 3.5% stake, is no longer worth $1 trillion on the stock market, as indicated on the plaque, but more than $2.5 trillion. On June 18, it even overtook Microsoft and Apple, peaking at $3.3 trillion, to briefly become the world's most valuable company.

Yet Nvidia doesn't produce smartphones, computers or software – just circuit boards. But these are the stuff of magic. They are the key to entering the disturbingly fascinating world of artificial intelligence (AI). Their computing speed and flexibility of use mean they are currently unrivaled on the market. As a result, when Microsoft, Google or Amazon decided in 2023 to invest tens of billions of dollars in data centers designed to train AI models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT conversational robot, they had no choice but to knock on Nvidia's door for chips. And their billion-dollar investments went straight into the San José company's pocket.

In the 2023 fiscal year, Nvidia's sales jumped 126% to $61 billion, and net income came close to $30 billion – unheard of in the austere world of chipmakers, or even in technology in general. Intel, in the glory days of its PC monopoly with Microsoft, never achieved as much. Nor did Apple at the height of its iPhone frenzy, to the point of perplexing analysts: is the frenzy just a short-lived craze, another tech bubble, or a true shift of era?

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