For Intel, 2024 has been a cruel year, maybe the worst of years.

Intel  (INTC)  has struggled to jumpstart a storied business that has been unable to cope with the violent and dynamic changes that have overtaken the semiconductor industry.

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The shares ended Friday at $23.20, up 7.8% on the day but down a sickening 54% on the year.

Intel's market cap is "only" $100 billion, but that's down from $282 billion in February 2020.

Related: Veteran trader makes surprising call between Palantir, Nvidia stock

For Nvidia  (NVDA) , this has been the best of years. The company, led by Jensen Huang, makes the graphic processing chips that are the foundation of artificial intelligence, and everyone wants a piece of the company. The shares were up 2% to $135.40 on Friday and are up 173.4% on the year.

Its market capitalization is now at $3.32 trillion, second only to Apple  (AAPL) , whose market cap is now $3.37 billion. Huang is now a billionaire.

Small wonder that S&P Dow Jones Indices, the company that manages the Dow Jones Industrial Average, announced Friday that Nvidia will replace Intel in the Dow before the U.S. stock market opens on Nov. 8.

The reason, the index manager said, was to ensure a more representative exposure to the semiconductor industry.

Why Nvidia goes into the Dow Jones 30

Nvidia enters the Dow in part because its stock price is so high compared with Intel's. The Dow is a price-weighted index, and changes in a low-priced stock have little effect on the index.

Related: Nvidia to reap billions in AI spending as Mag 7 peers ramp investments

Nvidia's inclusion in the Dow became increasingly probable after it split its stock 10-for-1 earlier this year.

In the grand scheme of things, however, being in the Dow is not as important as getting into the S&P 500. Few money managers benchmark their results against the Dow Jones Industrial Average despite it being a commonly referenced index. The S&P 500 dominates that world.

Nvidia's forte originally was making fast chips for video games. Then, developers of artificial intelligence discovered the technology could completely remake computing.

Its H100 AI chips quickly became in high demand because they were far more efficient at training and operating AI models like ChatGPT than CPUs, which dominate data centers.

The H100 was followed by the H200, which will soon be replaced by Nvidia's latest chips, Blackwell.

Nvidia's market capitalization jumped from $18 billion at the end of 2015 to $3.32 trillion, a gain of some 18,350%.