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

The S&P 500 launches electric vehicle maker Tesla from its ESG index on an annual rebalancing. Meanwhile, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and even the multinational oil and gas company Exxon Mobil have been included in the list.

The S&P 500 ESG uses environmental, social and management data to rank and effectively recommend companies to investors. Its criteria include hundreds of company data points that relate to the way businesses affect the planet and relate to stakeholders outside of shareholders – including customers, employees, suppliers, partners and neighbors.

The changes to the index took effect on May 2, and a spokesman for the index explained why they were made in a blog post published on Wednesday.

It says Tesla’s “lack of a low-carbon strategy” and “codes of business conduct”, along with racism and poor working conditions reported at Tesla’s Fremont, California plant, have affected the outcome. Tesla’s work with an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also weighed heavily on the result.

While Tesla’s stated mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, in February this year it settled with the Environmental Protection Agency to track its own emissions after years of violations of the Clean Air and Neglect Act. Tesla ranks 22nd in last year’s Index of Toxic 100 Air Pollutants, compiled annually by the U-Mass Amherst Political Economy Research Institute – worse than Exxon Mobil, which ranks 26th. (The index uses data from 2019, the most recent available.)

In Tesla’s first quarter file, the company also revealed that it was under investigation for waste treatment in the state of California and that it had to pay a fine in Germany for failing to meet its “return” obligations for exhausted batteries. .

Meanwhile, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing has filed a lawsuit against Tesla for harassment and discrimination against blacks at the Fremont car plant. The agency said it had found evidence that Tesla routinely kept black workers at a low level in the company, gave them more difficult physical and dangerous tasks and retaliated when they complained of racist insults.

Last year, the National Labor Council said Tesla had also been involved in unfair labor practices.

“While Tesla can play a role in getting fuel-powered cars off the road, it lags behind when viewed through a wider ESG lens,” the S&P spokesman wrote.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk expressed dissatisfaction with the index on Wednesday morning on Twitter, where it boasts more than 90 million followers, saying S&P Global Ratings has “lost its integrity”.

In an earlier tweet, Musk wrote: “I am increasingly convinced that the corporate ESG is the incarnation of the devil.”

A subsequent report on the impact of Tesla said:

“Current Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting does not measure the extent of the positive impact on the world. Instead, it focuses on measuring the dollar value of risk / return. Individual investors – who entrust their money to ESG funds with large investment institutions – may not be aware that their money can be used to buy shares in companies that aggravate climate change rather than improve it.

In this report, Tesla argues that other carmakers could achieve higher ESG ratings even if they barely reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and continue to produce vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Shares of Tesla traded down more than 7% at noon on Wednesday amid a wide market sell-off. The company’s shares fell more than 30% this year.

ExxonMobil, the leading U.S. oil and gas producer, is piloting a project to dig up bitcoins in North Dakota, according to people familiar with the matter.

For more than a year, Exxon has been working with Crusoe Energy Systems, a Denver-based company, said people who asked not to be named because details of the project are confidential. Crusoe’s technology helps oil companies turn lost energy or flare gas into a useful resource.

Similar to the ConocoPhillips digging scheme in the Baku area of ​​North Dakota, Exxon diverts natural gas that would otherwise be burned into generators that convert the gas into electricity used to power shipping containers filled with thousands of bitcoin diggers. Exxon launched the pilot model at the end of January 2021 and expanded its construction in July.

Although Exxon did not speak publicly about his work in the space, Eric Obrok, a 10-year veteran of the company, said on his LinkedIn account that from February 2019 to January 2022, he “proposed and led the first successful commercial and technical demonstration of the use of Bitcoin Proof-of-Work digging as a viable alternative to burning natural gas in oil. “

Obrock’s title in his profile is the NGL industry’s forecasting advisor for the liquefied natural gas market. Obrok told CNBC in a message on LinkedIn that he had been advised not to speak to the media on the subject. Exxon did not respond to a request for comment.

Exxon’s Bitcoin project is not really about making money from cryptocurrency. Rather, the company is committed to reducing emissions as part of the industry’s efforts to meet higher environmental requirements. In early March, Exxon joined other oil companies in their commitment to the World Bank’s Zero Routine Burning to 2030 initiative, launched in 2015.

The type of cryptocurrency agreement that follows with Crusoe reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to the continued burning of torches.

Exxon’s work on digging bitcoins in North Dakota was first reported by Bloomberg, which said the company was also considering similar pilots in Alaska, the Qua Iboe terminal in Nigeria, Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale deposit, Guyana and Germany.

The problem that Exxon and Conoco have been dealing with has existed for years: What happens when drilling accidentally hits a natural gas formation?

Unlike oil, which can be transported by truck to a remote destination, gas supply requires a pipeline. If the drilling site is close to a pipeline, manufacturers can sell it immediately. But if the pipe is full or if the gas is 20 miles away, drilling often burns it. That’s why you usually see flames rising from oil fields.

In addition to environmental hazards, drilling also burns money.

Enter bitcoin digging, which requires only an internet connection and can be done from anywhere. And because miners’ main variable price is energy, they are encouraged to find the cheapest sources of energy.

“It’s just a great way to bring this demand to waste and solve two problems at once,” said Cully Kavnes, president of Crusoe, whose supporters include Valor Equity Partners, one of Tesla’s biggest investors. “Solve the energy appetite of bitcoin and solve the problem of stagnant energy and flare gas for the energy industry.”

Cavness said Crusoe has 150 employees and works with Norway’s Equinor ASA, Canadian oil producer Enerplus and Devon Energy, based in Oklahoma City.

Permits from the North Dakota Air Quality Division show that the Crusoe can run 20 portable engines, 11 of which are currently used in wells across the state. Two of the engines run in wells operated by XTO Energy, Exxon’s oil and gas fracking subsidiary at the Jorgenson Deep Creek site. Cavness said most of Crusoe’s more than 80 data centers are located in Bakken.

“I really move the needle at increased volumes,” Kavnes said. “More than 10 million cubic feet of gas a day that will be burned is not burned because we have deployed our systems.”

The World Bank in its latest report on a partnership to reduce gas combustion globally recognized Crusoe as offering an innovative solution for flare burning.

The Bakken Formation has become an important source of new oil production in the United States over the past few decades with a boom in hydraulic fracturing.

Craig Thorstenson has been working on the North Dakota Air Quality Licensing Program since 1989. He says North Dakota has always been an oil state to some degree, but Bakken’s growth has put the state second in the country before to retire in third place last year.

Thorstenson, who was born and raised in Bismarck, the state capital, said the change was “quite a shock to us.” Residential housing could not cope with the demand.

“We had a population boom,” Thorstenson said. “People who come want to find a job. People living in Walmart car parks.

More drilling meant more gas loss, which affected the entire Williston Basin, which extends to parts of Montana, Dakota and Canada. This is a big reason for Crusoe to invest heavily in the area.

“In moments from not-so-distant history, the pool burned to almost a fifth of the gas produced there,” Kavnes said.

Thorstenson said the amount of wasted natural gas was finally declining. In a March report, the North Dakota Department of Natural Resources estimated that 93% to 94% of natural gas is currently being captured. In 2014, the commission had a capture target of 74%.

Historically, drilling has chosen torch burning as a way to dispose of excess gas because it is less harmful to the environment than a release that releases methane directly into the air and produces greenhouse effects that have proven to be 84 to 86 times more powerful than CO2 over a 20-year period.

Even during combustion, some methane is released due to wind and other factors. Extracting bitcoins on site can be particularly impactful, as 100% of methane is burned and nothing leaks or is released into the air, according to Adam Ortolf, who runs U.S. business development for Upstream Data, a company that makes and supplies portable mining solutions for oil and gas facilities.

“No one will run it through a generator unless they can make money because generators cost money to acquire and maintain,” Ortolf said. “So, unless it is economically sustainable, producers will not burn gas internally.”

Crusoe systems are designed to make the process financially viable for drilling. The company is introducing its equipment on the oil rig, which allows it to convert otherwise wasted natural gas into electricity, which then feeds the calculations at the well site.

“When we run it through our generator, we get up to 99.9% combustion of this methane,” said Kavnes. “Not only do we use otherwise wasted energy, but we also significantly reduce methane emissions.”

Kavnes said his main conclusion from the last UN climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, was that methane was a low-hanging fruit.

“This is what we want to solve as an energy industry,” he said.

I WATCH: Texas crypto miners are shutting down to ease network pressure