Did a lottery winner become "the company of the future"?
Office Hours #Q&A #WWDC · 3 comments
by Horace Dediu
An Office Hours question, June 9, 2026.
Q: The Wall Street Journal just ranked Nvidia the top “company of the future,” with Apple down at number 12. What’s going on with Apple’s brand image — and is that ranking right?
Look at Nvidia’s history. For most of it, revenue was flat. Then, in the last few years, it wasn’t. We usually picture growth as a hockey stick — really a smooth, almost exponential curve. Nvidia isn’t that. It’s a flat line, and then another line at a very steep angle. Zero to one. It isn’t even a curve; it’s two lines.
Compare it to everyone else. Meta has a nice curve. Microsoft and Google look brilliant. Apple, apart for seasonal spikes, is similar, and so is Amazon. But Nvidia is a step function. That's because they got lucky. The chip they’d been making for years — a graphics accelerator, a matrix-multiplication machine that does one thing, scaled up — turned out to be useful first for crypto, and then, just as suddenly, perfect for AI, which is nothing more than linear algebra. They won the lottery.
Now, they’re smart, and they didn’t squander it. They’re building ecosystems and platforms on top. I’m not against Nvidia. But to call a lottery winner the “best company of the future” says nothing about sustainability, processes, priorities, or scale. How many customers does Nvidia have? Five, maybe — the big hyperscalers, every one of which is desperate to fire them. How many chips does it ship? Tens of millions, each costing tens of thousands. Very profitable. But Apple ships hundreds of millions of A-series chips a year, and more. The silicon Apple puts into people’s hands is orders of magnitude more prolific.
If Apple’s roadmap bakes-in exactly what AI needs then where is Nvidia in a decade? Maybe in the PC business. Maybe the next Intel. The premise that they have an unassailable advantage, what Buffett calls a moat and the strategy people call sustainable competitive advantage, is exactly what I’m not convinced of. IBM in its heyday had far more diversity. Nvidia, to me, is a very good company, but a very lucky one, comparable to Qualcomm. And building chips was never a foundation for becoming the greatest company in the world forever.
Editor’s Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco’s June 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, open to Asymco One subscribers.
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3 comments
rbgayle ·
In many ways, Nvidia's organizational structure is more akin to Apple's than any of the other big techs, with perhaps a similar ability to innovate because of that. It has certainly been pretty nimble with its newfound wealth. We shall see if that structure allows Nvidia to make great decisions, to prosper with its lottery winnings rather than squander them like Meta or Alphabet. And to succeed if/when there is a readjustment in the AI sphere.
farshad ·
I’m no organizational expert but it seems Apple has to maintain in an integrated fashion a much larger diversity of knowledge, and much wider touch surface of customers, partners, processes, etc. Modern computing history is riddled with companies who intentionally tried to do this and screwed it up: Digital, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, and to a large extent Microsoft & Google.
As hard and competitive chip business is, there have been many long-term platers: IBM, Motorola, Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Nvidia.
spindle-putrid.1t ·
Modern intelligence is the first time human can harvest/colonize a non-human space. As long as the value of output exceeds the cost, the long-term potential is much more than the consumer markets. There is no precedent use case to study or compare against.
You may argue NYT reaches the right conclusion with the wrong reasons.