In an industry that moves at breathtaking speed, defining what technology is at the frontier or enabling access to it is a beguiling challenge.
According to the theories of nineteenth-century economist David Ricardo, firms trade across international boundaries freely. Geographic cost differences yield specialization; exchange yields mutual benefit. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Pax Americana enabled the system of comparative advantage and global trade to flourish as never before. American tech companies and their shareholders have been among the greatest beneficiaries of this system. Apple—with its products famously designed in California, made in China, and sold all over—is the prime example. Chip designer Nvidia, now among the world’s most successful firms in terms of market capitalization, is another.
Nvidia’s rise from obscurity to global sector domination is a great American success story. Starting in the 1990s, its GPUs (graphics processing units) originally served the video game market. Nvidia’s parallel processing technology development made images clearer and gameplay sharper. Incidentally, it laid the technical groundwork for the global artificial intelligence wave that has crashed ashore in the last decade. Nvidia’s revenue increased from less than $5 billion in fiscal 2015 to $10 billion in 2020 and to $130 billion in 2025. Its share price has gone from under $1 in 2015 to over $100 today.
Continue reading the entire piece at The National Interest
______________________
Jordan McGillis is City Journal’s Economics Editor.
Photo by Just_Super/Getty Images
