Nvidia, the chipmaker led by Jensen Huang, is on track to break a global record for annual corporate earnings, according to Barron's.
The milestone would surpass the benchmark set by Saudi Arabia's state oil monopoly. Barron's reports that Saudi Aramco recorded the largest annual corporate profit ever—$161 billion in 2022. Nvidia is now poised to top that figure.
Barron's frames the achievement as no accident, pointing to Huang's leadership as central to how the company reached this point.
The broader context is the surge in demand for Nvidia's chips, which sit at the center of the artificial-intelligence boom. The company has ridden that wave to extraordinary financial scale, and the prospect of overtaking an oil giant's record profit underscores how much value has shifted toward the firms building the hardware behind AI.
Why it matters: if Nvidia eclipses the most profitable year any company has ever posted, it would mark a symbolic passing of the torch from the oil era's biggest earners to the chipmakers powering the AI era.