Here’s the Staggering Per-Employee Value of Nvidia

What would you get in the—unlikely, to be sure—event that your employer was sold and every worker got an equal share of the take? For Nvidia employees, we’re talking millions and millions of dollars.

Nvidia (NVDA), the world’s most valuable company, is worth about $3.5 trillion. With just 36,000 employees, its market capitalization per employee stands at above $90 million. That’s nearly three times competitor Broadcom’s (AVGO) per-employee value, and it dwarfs Apple’s (AAPL) $18 million and Microsoft’s (MSFT) $15 million.

These figures were recently crunched by Deutsche Bank research strategist Jim Reid, who wondered: “Are today’s largest companies structurally employing fewer people than in the past?”

To answer that question, Reid looked back at some of America’s most valuable companies since 1950 and their respective headcounts when their value was at its peak. One might assume there’s been a structural shift toward smaller employee rolls as technological advancements improved efficiency, but history suggests “employment density” at America’s biggest companies goes through cycles.

Few Companies With Headcounts Like Nvidia’s Have Same Value

General Motors (GM), America’s largest company in the 1950s, employed about 600,000 people at its peak. Just years later, in the late ’60s, Eastman Kodak surpassed GM in market value with just one-sixth of the workforce. In the ’70s, General Electric employed about 400,000 people. 

These are enormous workforces compared with Nvidia’s, which from a market cap per employee perspective is in a league of its own, Reid says. But a few companies with headcounts comparable with Nvidia’s have become the world’s most valuable. Oil company Amoco’s margins were padded by elevated oil prices in the late 1970s, helping its market cap surge with only about 50,000 workers. 

Cisco is the historical example that most resembles Nvidia. Like Cisco in the late ’90s, Nvidia is “operationally lean, highly reliant on intellectual property and engineering talent, and outsources the more labour-intensive aspects of production,” wrote Reid.

The analysis could offer some relief to those concerned that the proliferation of artificial intelligence will result in mass unemployment as AI agents and robots replace human workers.

“What’s clear through history is that while we’ve always found ways to employ people, how they’re distributed across firms and sectors is constantly evolving,” Reid wrote.