According to NASDAQ, Nvidia's value has surpassed Intel's; the GPU company has finally surpassed the CPU company's market cap (total shares outstanding) by $251 billion to $248 billion. In this way, it was a massive leather jacket for Jen-Hsun.

This rise is the result of a more than 70% increase in the stock price over the past year. This is huge for this fabless company, not only because it doesn't actually manufacture its own chips, but also because its previous highs during the cryptocurrency boom were monumentally high, even though they were deemed by many to be unsustainable at the time.

NVIDIA's stock price is currently $408.64. This shatters a peak of $281 in September 2018, before the shockwaves of the cryptocurrency mining boom sent Nvidia's stock price tumbling. And this time, its stock price is not intrinsically tied to the flash-in-the-pan mining movement.

So what's the reason brokers are buying up NVIDIA stock? There is no doubt that CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's constant emphasis on data center positioning and computing-focused technology has drawn many into the Green Team camp. However, it is also worth knowing that market capitalization is an indication of a company's value, not how much money it has generated. In this regard, Nvidia's $10.9 billion in sales is hardly comparable to Intel's $72 billion in total sales.

In other words, this is as indicative of Nvidia's expected future performance as it means today, and there are several potential explanations (via Seeking Alpha) as to why everyone has set their expectations so high.

Nvidia is making a lot of money in its data center business, but GeForce remains a major earner; the Nvidia Ampere GeForce GPU is expected to arrive later this year, and we've already seen one bearing the RTX 3080 name. It is also hoped that the general excitement surrounding the next generation of consoles (yes, the ones with AMD RDNA 2) will actually strengthen the PC gaming market and Nvidia's sales.

There is also the existing push into the data center with the Ampere compute architecture and A100 that Nvidia likes to showcase in its AI inference-accelerating DGX systems: eight Nvidia A100 cards, 320GB of HBM2 memory, 15TB of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and two AMD EPYC CPUs.

But let's not forget the competition; AMD is set to release its own RDNA 2 graphics cards for PCs later this year, along with Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles based on the same architecture. This is a very full lineup for the Red Team, so Nvidia will have its work cut out for it if it wants to gain an edge.