Nvidia's chips are very popular. Its brand, less so.
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- Nvidia recently joined Microsoft and Apple in the multi-trillion dollar valuation club.
- But Nvidia's brand doesn't have the household familiarity of the iconic Apple logo or Nike swoosh.
- Consulting firm Interbrand's list of top 100 global brands doesn't even include the chipmaker.
Some of the world's most iconic brands can be recognized by simply describing their logos.
The apple. The golden arches. The swoosh.
But what company comes to a consumer's mind when referencing a green spiral? Is it an eye? A portal to another dimension?
That's a question best aimed at Nvidia, which recently turned into a multi-trillion dollar company thanks to its valuable chips that are crucial in the artificial intelligence race.
While its current valuation has led CEO Jensen Huang's company to join the ranks of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, the chipmaker may have some ways to go before it becomes a household name.
According to Interbrand, a New York consulting firm, some of the 100 most valuable global brands in 2023 include storied companies like Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Nike, and McDonald's — brands whose logos and products instantly recall a familiar memory in people's minds.
Nvidia, however, is nowhere on the list.
"As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue," Greg Silverman, the global director of brand economics at Interbrand, told CNBC.
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.
A tale of two chipmakers
Part of Nvidia's brand issue could be that the company hasn't been focused on consumer-facing products since its inception in 1993. Nvidia's chips were originally designed for video games and became a computer hobbyist's favorite company.
Intel, a once-dominant chips manufacturer that has lost its lead in recent years, faced a similar branding issue before it launched the "Intel Inside" campaign in the '90s.
"Before the "Intel Inside" campaign, Intel had been largely unknown to consumers," the company states on its website. Intel currently ranks 24th on Interbrand's list of the most valuable brands despite its current market cap of about $132 billion compared to Nvidia's $3.1 trillion valuation as of June 23.
In the past few months, Nvidia's stock and recognition have soared because the company's chips are required to power the technology behind AI.
Companies like Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft need, and sometimes fight, for what is a limited supply of Nvidia's GPUs.
Those chips positioned the 31-year-old company for its recent trillion-dollar success story, and now Nvidia dominates the AI-computing market. But that position is not guaranteed.
A growing list of companies and start-ups are trying to carve their own space in the chips market. Some of them, including Meta and Microsoft, rely on Nvidia's chips.
If Nvidia's dominance in chips falls, getting people to recognize the swirling green eye will be the least of the company's problems.