Getty Images
Nvidia was a gaming GPU company, however the company’s worth has completely skyrocketed due to the AI craze and a GPU’s worth in accelerating AI workloads. A number of purpose-built chips later, just like the H100 Tensor Core GPU (with a worth of $25,000-$40,000!) and A100, and Nvidia’s inventory is up 50 % this yr. At press time, Nvidia’s market cap is now $1.8 trillion, beating Amazon ($1.76 trillion) and Google’s father or mother company, Alphabet ($1.77 trillion), to change into the world’s fourth most valuable company.
How a lot additional can Nvidia’s blazing inventory rally go? Next up on the ‘highest market cap’ checklist is Saudi Aramco, the nationwide oil company of Saudi Arabia, at $2.0 trillion; then Apple, at $2.8 trillion; and one other company driving the AI wave, Microsoft, at $3 trillion.
Nvidia’s subsequent earnings report is February 21. The final one was for Q3 2023, displaying that the company is mainly promoting each AI chip it may well make. Revenue was up 206 % from the identical quarter final yr, and of the company’s $18.12 billion in income, $14.51 billion was generated by its AI/information middle division. This fall will most likely be one other record-setting quarter for the company, and arising in Q2 2024, Nvidia will launch its next-gen AI chip, the HGX H200 Tensor Core GPU. A TrendForce estimate places Nvidia’s AI server market share at 60–70 %.
One probably scary factor for Nvidia is that a variety of AI corporations are trying into constructing their very own chips. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman needs to see trillions extra invested in AI chip infrastructure, which might dwarf the present ~$500 billion chip business. Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are literally at odds about how the way forward for AI chip manufacturing ought to scale. Altman recently tweeted: “We imagine the world wants extra AI infrastructure—fab capability, vitality, datacenters, and so on—than individuals are at the moment planning to construct. Building massive-scale AI infrastructure, and a resilient provide chain, is essential to financial competitiveness.”
Huang, responding to that Wall Street Journal report, does not suppose that rather more manufacturing is warranted, saying, “You can’t assume simply that you’ll purchase extra computer systems. You must additionally assume that the computer systems are going to change into sooner and due to this fact the overall quantity that you just want just isn’t as a lot.”
There is a large AI chip scarcity proper now, so mainly, each huge AI participant has some type of chip program going. There are applications from Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, AMD, Google, and probably others. Will anybody ever have the ability to catch Nvidia, although?