Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.

The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.

“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, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI software.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.

Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.

Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.

However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.

For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.

Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

WATCH: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ should have another good earnings season

When Apple announced the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs called it a “revolutionary product” in a handset category that he said needed to be reinvented. 

Now, nearly two decades and 42 models later, the iPhone is one of the world’s most popular phones. Apple has sold over 2.3 billion units of the iPhone and has over 1.5 billion active users, according to research from Demand Sage.

The original iPhone was released in June 2007 and exclusively sold with AT&T for $499. 

“Investors were optimistic about the impact that it could have with Apple,” said Deepwater Asset’s Gene Munster. “The initial data that came out from AT&T was a disappointment from that first few days of sales. I remember talking to investors after that first weekend, and the general sense was that this product, in one investor’s words, was dead on arrival.”

Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007 with 80% of the sales coming in Q4. In the same year Nokia, the maker of the iconic Nokia 3310, sold 7.4 million mobile phones in Q4 alone. 

“Nokia was seen as unstoppable, unbeatable,” said CNBC technology reporter Kif Leswing.

“The investing community largely took this as something that is going to be a much more difficult market for Apple to really crack,” said Munster. 

Things started to shift for Apple in 2008 when it launched the App Store. This helped spur a new wave of modern tech companies like Uber and put Apple ahead of its competitors. 

“The App Store allowed your phone to become a lot more,” said Munster. “That was the piece, that insight, other phone manufacturers didn’t see that coming.”

Apple saw increased iPhone unit sales in the years following the App Store. The company hit a major milestone — more than 50 million units sold — in 2011, with the help of the iPhone 4s. The company sold 72 million units that year. By 2015, Apple was selling over 200 million iPhone units yearly. 

“I don’t think there’s any question the iPhone set the standard that really almost all phones have followed since then,” said Computer History Museum’s Marc Weber. “The App Store was a huge thing and Android basically followed that model with the Play Store.”

A decade after the iPhone’s release, Apple was the first publicly traded U.S. company to hit a $1 trillion market cap and it’s now one of the most profitable companies in the world. 

Apple recently surpassed Samsung, one of its biggest competitors, as the world’s smartphone leader for the first time. According to data from the International Data Corp., Apple holds just over 20% of the global market share, a spot that Samsung held since 2010. 

“There was a period from 2008 to 2015 where Apple needed to worry about what Samsung was going to do with Android. Their market share was actually declining globally,” said Munster. “But, what Apple has been the master at is building the ecosystem. I can’t imagine a scenario where Samsung can build a suite of products that is going to disrupt the Apple ecosystem.”

Recently, Apple has been dabbling in machine learning and AI for the iPhone, but companies such as Microsoft, Google and Open AI have more openly embraced the technology.

“AI is going to be critical to humanity, and it’s going to be a critical feature inside of iPhones,” said Munster. “Apple uses AI to make the products work better with organizing photos, with helping organize emails, and potentially doing things around text organization. But for the most part is that the iPhone doesn’t capture, doesn’t really capture the full opportunity. Far from it when it comes to AI.”

Watch the video to learn more about how the iPhone shaped Apple.

of Samsung the brand is everywhere. From Galaxy phones and smart TVs to washing machines and refrigerators, the company says its products can be found in nearly three-quarters of US households.

But Samsung is much more than gadgets and appliances, and there’s another reason why it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. It is the second largest manufacturer of chips that power so many popular devices.

For more than three decades, Samsung has been the leader in memory chips used to store digital data. But it was a market in turmoil. Memory chip prices have fallen over the past year and are expected to fall by as much as 23% more in the current quarter. Samsung reported dismal first-quarter earnings in April, with profit falling to its lowest level since 2009.

Samsung responded by reducing production of memory chips. Elsewhere in the industry, smaller rival Micron said recently it expects to cut 15% of its workforce.

Amid the wreckage, the giant company found growth in another corner of the semiconductor market, doubling down on its foundry business, the country that makes custom chips for massive customers like Qualcomm, Tesla, Intel and Sonyas well as thousands of smaller players.

Samsung is building a $17 billion chip manufacturing plant, or factory, in Taylor, Texas, where it is promised to begin the first American production of advanced chips next year. Applications opened in February for companies like Samsung to get their share of the $52.7 billion CHIPS and Science Act, passed by lawmakers last year to bring chip manufacturing to the US after 30 years of losing market share to Asia.

Samsung is also adding capacity in its home country of South Korea, spending $228 billion on a mega cluster of five new factories scheduled to come online by 2042.

“They spend and spend and spend,” said Dylan Patel of the research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis. “And why is that? So that they can catch up with technology, so that they can continue to maintain their leadership position.”

Samsung is one of only three companies to produce the world’s most advanced chips, ranking second only to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and ahead of Intel.

Now Samsung is aiming to catch TSMC.

“We’re not settling for being No. 2,” John Taylor, Samsung’s corporate vice president of factory engineering, said in an interview. “Samsung never settles for No. 2 as a business, as a company. We are very aggressive.”

The company announced an ambitious new roadmap in October, pursuing a goal of tripling its flagship manufacturing capacity and making industry-leading 2-nanometer chips by 2025 and downscaling to 1.4-nanometer by 2027.

“If Samsung hits their targets, they will leapfrog TSMC, but that’s a big if,” Patel said. “TSMC is the only one the industry trusts to deliver on their roadmap.”

CNBC recently entered Samsung’s Austin chip factory for the first in-depth tour given on camera to an American journalist. While there, we got a rare interview with the head of Samsung’s US chip business, Jinman Han.

A 34-year veteran of the company, Hahn’s U.S. oversight includes foundry operations and the memory chip business.

“We really want to be a foundation for American industry,” Hahn told CNBC.

Samsung started 85 years ago when founder Lee Byung-chull established it as a trading company to export fruits, vegetables and fish in Korea.

“His vision was for our company to be timeless, strong and powerful,” Khan said. “So he chose the name Samsung, which literally means three stars.”

To survive two major wars, the company diversified into industries such as textiles and retail. Samsung Electronics was established in 1969, the first Samsung TV came out in 1972, and two years after that Samsung bought Hankook Semiconductor in a bold attempt to create the vertically integrated consumer electronics giant that the company is today.

Samsung opened its first US offices in New Jersey in 1978. By 1983, it was producing 64KB dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips commonly used in computers, and the company had a new US office in Silicon Valley.

Lee Kun-hee took over after his father’s death in 1987, and Samsung’s first mobile phone arrived a year later. And now Samsung is the world’s largest smartphone vendor, going head-to-head with An apple.

Just a decade after making its first memory chip, Samsung hit the market with a version that had 1,000 times the capacity. It gained international recognition in 1992 with the world’s first 64MB DRAM chip, putting the company at the top of the memory market, where it remains today.

“Its presence is so ubiquitous in South Korea that they call their country the Republic of Samsung,” said Jeffrey Kane, author of the book Samsung Rising, published in 2020.

Samsung began manufacturing chips in the U.S. with its factory in Austin, Texas, which opened in 1996. It opened a second factory in the Texas capital in 2007. Today, Samsung’s Austin operation is entirely devoted to foundry.

Samsung’s expansion brought with it some legal conflict.

In 2018, the company finally ended a seven-year legal battle with Apple over whether Samsung copied the iPhone. Terms were not disclosed.

“Apple got paid by Samsung, so Apple technically won,” Cain said. “But when you add up all the legal costs, all the battles, all those years, it was just a neutral zero to zero for both sides.”

The challenges are not limited to the courtroom.

Protests erupted in South Korea over J.I. Lee, the third generation of Samsung’s founding family, taking the helm. He served time in prison for bribery before being pardoned in August and becoming executive chairman in October.

And during the pandemic, Samsung was hurt by global chip shortages as demand peaked and supply chains were disrupted.

“It was really painful,” Hahn said. “When you see your customers asking for more chips, but there’s no way to provide them, it was so painful.”

That dynamic is changing. As consumers curb spending in the face of rising inflation, demand for memory chips has weakened sharply. Han said Samsung’s internal data analysis showed that “the market will probably recover by the end of this year.”

Investors have already returned. Shares have fallen nearly 30% in the past year, along with the broader decline in the global technology industry. The stock has risen 28% this year and hit a 52-week high on June 5 on the Korea Stock Exchange. Morgan Stanley recently named it a top pick.

Part of the rally may reflect the latest chapter in the geopolitical chip war between China and the US

In May, China banned products from US memory maker Micron, sending Samsung shares tumbling. The US also granted Samsung a one-year exemption from operating its two chip factories in China, despite new rules in October that stop many chip companies from exporting their cutting-edge technology to the world’s second-largest economy.

Samsung says it is adding capacity in Taylor, Texas, which is northeast of Austin, due to demand in the US. More than 90% of modern chips are currently manufactured in Taiwan.

“Bringing Taylor on board will simply increase their ability to source their chips domestically and not have to go to parts of the world where they might experience some discomfort,” said Samsung’s John Taylor.

Over the past three decades, the US share of global chip production has fallen from 37% to just 12%. That’s largely because estimates show it costs at least 20 percent more to build and operate a new factory in the U.S. than in Asia, where labor is cheaper, the supply chain is more accessible and government incentives are much larger.

For Samsung’s Texas expansion, environmental concerns are high and growing.

The highest-priced equipment Samsung will bring to Taylor is likely the $200 million EUV lithography machines manufactured by ASML. They are the only devices in the world that can engrave with sufficient precision for the most advanced chips.

Each EUV machine is designed to consume about 1 megawatt of electricity, which is 10% more than the previous generation. One study found that Samsung used more than 20% of South Korea’s entire solar and wind power capacity in 2020.

“Electricity is the lifeblood of the semiconductor factory in a sense,” said Patel of SemiAnalysis. “There have been numerous instances where the electricity has gone out and companies have had to eliminate months of production.”

Texas’ energy grid is largely cut off from its neighbors, limiting its ability to borrow across state lines. In 2021, that grid failed during an extreme winter storm, leaving millions of Texans without power and causing at least 57 deaths.

“I’ve already signed 12 pieces of legislation to make the electric grid more reliable, more resilient and more secure,” Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott told CNBC in April. “And so we can definitely ensure that any business that moves here will have access to the energy they need, but at a low cost.”

Water is another major necessity for chip factories. In 2021, Samsung used about 38 billion gallons of water to make its chips. Approximately 80% of Texas remains affected by drought.

“We have the Texas Water Board working on that and legislation we’re working on this session to make sure that with the growing population in Texas, we’ll be able to provide the water needs not only for businesses, but for our growing population as well.” , Abbott said.

Samsung told CNBC that its goal in Austin is to reuse more than 1 billion gallons of water by 2023. At the new Taylor factory, the company aims to recycle more than 75 percent of the water it uses.

All the buzz in tech lately has been around AI models to power services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These applications require even more powerful processors, mostly made from now Nvidia.

“There are more and more people around the world who can make memory chips,” Cain said. “To stay ahead of the game, you need to get into the newer logic technologies.”

Cain said he sees Samsung “diving deeper into the logic chip segment. So, [that’s] AI chips, the future applications of semiconductor technology.”

When asked what’s next, Samsung’s Taylor said the company eventually plans to add more chip manufacturing capacity at its 1,200-acre site in Texas.

“We only have one factory listed there right now,” he said. “But there’s plenty of room for more.”

Watch the video for a behind-the-scenes look at Samsung’s chip factory in Austin and the construction project in Taylor, Texas.

The global chip shortage is far from over and the war in Ukraine continues to strain supplies of the critical parts needed, one analyst told CNBC on Tuesday.

“Semiconductor supplies will not increase immediately. There’s a lot of raw materials, gases, that were needed to make these semiconductors,” Vinay Gupta, International Data Corporation’s Asia-Pacific director of research, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.” “

Citing supply chain challenges due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Gupta said the two countries capture much of the market share, with Russia and Ukraine the biggest exporters of krypton, a gas used in chipmaking.

Neon is also critical to the chip-making process and is used for lasers known as lithography, where machines carve patterns onto tiny pieces of silicon made by Samsung, Intel and TSMC.

More than half the world’s neon is produced by a handful of companies in Ukraine, according to Peter Hanbury, a semiconductor analyst at research firm Bain & Co.

Semiconductors are used in everything from cell phones and computers to cars and household appliances.

Supply chain disruptions and rising costs will also mean that “the average selling price of devices will rise and infrastructure providers will then pass that on to customers,” Gupta added.

Rising inflation and expectations of more monetary tightening are already causing a “consumer-led slowdown,” Gupta said.

“IT spending, especially consumer IT spending, is showing signs of recession.”

Although spending on enterprise IT – which includes software services, cloud and IT services – is still holding up, inflation has been driving the business to “protect their IT budgets right now.”

Coupled with rising interest rates around the world, that slowdown “will bite,” he added.

“But hopes are that this will be a shallow slowdown as the government and central banks try to balance rising inflation and … interest rates,” Gupta added.

Statements by two officials last week indicated the Federal Reserve is on track for another sharp rate hike in July and possibly September, even if it slows the economy.

In June, the Fed approved a 75 basis point, or 0.75 percentage point, increase in its benchmark lending rate, the biggest such move since 1994.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported on Apple’s plans to slow hiring and growth spending next year to deal with a possible downturn. A “similar trend” will be seen across Asia’s tech sector, Gupta said.

“I believe that will be a trend that we will start to see.” [in] in late 2022 or early 2023 if the situation does not improve.”

“If we talk about IT services in Asia, most of them are experiencing pressure on margins due to rising wage costs and skills gaps … in the market.”

In India, for example, margins for tech giants are “a little bit lower, despite more hiring in the first quarter,” Gupta added. But that may not last long.

“Many businesses have turned to new digital technologies due to the pandemic, allowing their employees to work from home, so [there were] many new digital transformation projects,” he said.

“But we will start to see some pressure on margins because obviously corporate earnings will take a hit if we see the whole scenario play out the way you see it right now.”

The creator of Fortnite Epic Games has raised $ 2 billion in funding from Sony and the Lego family in a huge deal that highlights the excitement of big business about the so-called metauniverse.

Sony will invest $ 1 billion in the company, Epic announced on Monday, while Kirkbi, the family-owned investment company behind Lego, will invest the same amount. The deal, which is subject to normal closing conditions, will value Epic at $ 31.5 billion.

The news comes hot after a partnership announced by Epic and Lego last week aimed at jointly developing a “family-friendly” meta-universe for children. Lego already has a successful line of video games based on lucrative franchises, including Disney’s Star Wars and Warner Bros. Batman.

“Part of our investment is focused on trends that we believe will affect the future world in which we and our children will live,” Soren Thorup Sorensen, Kirkbi’s chief executive, said in a statement Monday.

“This investment will accelerate our commitment to the world of digital gaming, and we are pleased to be investing in Epic Games to support their continued journey of growth, with a long-term focus on the future metaverse.”

The noise around the metaverse, a proposed network of huge virtual worlds, has taken the corporate world by storm recently. Facebook launched the trend by renaming itself Meta, and several major brands, including JPMorgan, Samsung and Nike, began experimenting with the technology.

However, companies such as Epic and Roblox have long been talking about building a metaverse.

The Epic Battle Royale Fortnite game allows up to 100 players to fight for the last one. But it also branches out into other forms of entertainment, such as hosting music concerts by artists such as Travis Scott and Marshmelo.

Meanwhile, Roblox wants to build a metaverse where millions of people can gather to play games or even work in a virtual economy fueled by Robux, its own in-app currency.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said the fresh funds would help the company “accelerate our work to build the metaverse.”

“As we rethink the future of entertainment and gaming, we need partners who share our vision. “We found this in our partnership with Sony and KIRKBI,” Sweeney said in a statement.

Although best known as the company behind Fortnite, Epic Games is a powerful hub for video games. The company has developed Unreal Engine, one of the largest platforms used to create games, and runs its own online game store, which competes with Microsoft and Valve.

The company is at the center of a heated dispute between app developers and Apple over fees for the latter’s App Store. Last year, a judge ruled that Apple could no longer stop developers from directing consumers away from Apple’s own payment system. The tech giant typically reduces 15% to 30% of all in-app purchases.

BARCELONA – Apple’s decision to stop selling products in Russia is putting pressure on other smartphone makers to do the same, analysts say.

Apple announced its decision on Tuesday, along with a number of other actions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All Apple products in the company’s online Russian store are listed as “unavailable” for purchase or delivery in the country. Apple does not operate Apple’s physical stores in Russia.

The move “absolutely” puts pressure on rival companies like Samsung to follow, CCS Insight chief analyst Ben Wood told CNBC on Wednesday. Samsung did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

“It’s important that they make a statement,” Wood said of Apple. “They lead the way,” he said, adding that some of Apple’s competitors sell significant volumes in Russia.

Apple also said it had removed Russian state-owned RT News and Sputnik News from its App Store in countries around the world except Russia.

The Cupertino-based technology giant is in a “strong position” to take the action it needs, Wood said. “It’s a big player in the technology space and one of the most valuable companies in the world.”

The iPhone accounts for about 15 percent of the Russian smartphone market, according to Counterpoint Research, which said Apple sold about 32 million iPhones in the country last year.

Anschel Sag, chief analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, told CNBC that Apple’s move “could force others to follow suit.”

Given that Russia is not a major market for Apple, it is unlikely that the company’s actions will have a significant impact on the company, according to Wood. “Their business is so big that it’s very sustainable,” he said. “The loss of this revenue will not have a catastrophic impact on the business.”

Technical analyst and investor Benedict Evans said financial sanctions and currency instability may also have made it difficult for Apple to sell its products in Russia. In fact, Apple halted sales in Turkey in November when the pound collapsed.

“The roll fell by 30% yesterday [on Tuesday]so it’s not clear what price they should charge for the iPhone, and bank sanctions make it difficult or impossible to transfer money from sales there outside the country, “Evans told CNBC.” So no matter what the policy, there are major practical difficulties for anyone who imports goods into Russia at the moment. “

Evans also noted on Twitter that Apple has no problem doing business in China, adding that “it’s always easier to stand up when it’s not 20% of your revenue and most of your production.” .

On Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Mikhail Fedorov called on Apple CEO Tim Cook to complete the work and block access to the App Store in Russia. On Wednesday, he called on Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation to stop supporting Russian markets and “temporarily blocks all Russian and Belarusian accounts.”

Companies around the world are rapidly withdrawing from Russia as governments impose sanctions on the country. As Western countries withdraw their support, Chinese companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi may be able to push deeper into the country.

“The Chinese are well established [in Russia] and trade links seem to remain open, “Wood said.” That could be an opportunity. “