This appeared last week.
How Nvidia became the world’s most important company overnight
By James Titcomb and Matthew Field
Now, it costs the same amount to buy just one of Nvidia’s microprocessors, and it can’t make enough of them.
Its latest boost came on Wednesday night, when the business revealed quarterly profits had climbed by a staggering 843 per cent in a year alone, up from $US656 million to $US6.2 billion.
Sales in its data centre business, which reflects demand for its top AI chips, climbed by 141 per cent in just three months, surpassing even Wall Street’s lofty expectations.
The best news for investors was that the company predicted the party would continue, forecasting another leap in sales in the third quarter of this year.
Shares, already at a record high, rose by 6.5 per cent as markets opened on Thursday and to some, the only question is how high can it can go.
The latest rally cemented Nvidia’s spot as a world-leading tech giant.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive and principal founder, always had big ambitions.
The company decided to focus on video games in the 1990s when Huang observed demand for increasingly advanced computer graphics and predicted a need for drastically more powerful chips as games moved towards more immersive and 3D worlds.
But even he would have failed to see the AI rush that boosted his personal fortune to $US42 billion.
Nvidia’s work on computer graphics in the 1990s led it to invent the graphics processing unit (GPU), a type of microchip dedicated to computer gaming and video tasks. GPUs, however, also excel at other types of number crunching.
Nvidia thrived during the cryptocurrency booms of 2017 and 2021, as its processors proved to be highly proficient at the high-powered mathematics needed to mint new Bitcoins.
It also rode a brief flurry of excitement around the “metaverse”, the virtual reality championed by Mark Zuckerberg.
However, the AI boom has eclipsed all that.
Large language models such as ChatGPT and Google Bard require thousands of GPUs, both for their initial “training” and for the subsequent interactions known as inferences.
Almost every company and government is falling over themselves to invest in AI.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which operate the giant cloud computing data centres on which AI models generally run, are placing orders worth billions of dollars with Nvidia.
To a degree, Huang is fortunate his video game chips are so well suited to AI, but his allies reject suggestions he simply stumbled upon a pot of gold.
“He was one of the early people to think about it (AI) and study it,” says a former Nvidia executive.
“Jensen had big ears, he was listening to what was happening, he was experimenting and investing in how they could tweak these GPUs to be better at this stuff.
“He took a decision to bet significantly on AI in around 2018.”
Today, the company has competition from chip making giants AMD and Intel but enjoys a huge head start. So much so that Nvidia is now practically synonymous with AI itself.
Vastly more here:
NVIDIA really seems to be one of a kind, and it is really hard to know just what comes next, but kaking ti to a market cap. Of US$1.2 Trillion is an indicator of considerable success, but surely also some hype?
It is an amazing success story but I am sure only one of a few if we manage to keep to planet on an even keel for the next 20 years or so. There are some real existential risks out there sadly!!
David.
No comments:
Post a Comment