Nvidia's Ascent Proves AI is Where It's At 🤖

Nvidia has joined the trillionaire club. Or rather, it had.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker, popular for its GeForce line of gaming video cards, saw a meteoric rise in its stock price this past couple of weeks following its earnings release. The catalyst? Artificial intelligence.

The public release and subsequent success of ChatGPT may have turned both OpenAI and Microsoft's fortunes around, but the hardware that makes large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT possible is mostly Nvidia's. What else would have the computational power to process large swathes of data if not Nvidia's graphic cards? So it was only a matter of time before Nvidia cashed in on all the success, in this case, with a massive and sudden increase in its stock price.

It all began with the release of the company's first-quarter earnings, where the company reported sales of $7.19 billion — down 13% from a year ago and up 19% from the previous quarter. But that's not what caught investors' attention; it's what the company’ forecast it will generate in sales next quarter that had everyone losing their minds.

Team Green said it expected to generate $11 billion in sales during the second quarter of the year, a whopping 50% above Wall Street estimates of $7.15 billion. "The computer industry is going through two simultaneous transitions — accelerated computing and generative AI," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said at the time of the earnings release. "We are significantly increasing our supply to meet surging demand for them."

Immediately, Nvidia stocks began rising and the company's shares briefly crossed the $400 apiece mark, giving it a valuation of over $1 trillion — only the fifth U.S. company to have ever done so. While the company's shares have dropped below the $400 apiece mark, they're still a lot more valuable than just two weeks ago, safely adding over $200 billion to its market value since the release of its earnings.

Nvidia has had a string of success with its graphic cards, though not necessarily for the reasons everyone assumes. Graphic cards have traditionally been a mainstay of PC gaming, but with the craze surrounding cryptocurrency, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the computational prowess of the company's graphic cards became essential for miners looking in to cashing in on the crypto boom, making them "considerably harder to get than drugs."

The company was already the most valuable chip manufacturer in the world, even before the craze surrounding AI, valued at far higher than competitors Intel and AMD, who, although very, very successful by their own account, are nowhere near as valuable as Nvidia. Don't believe us? Here's what they're valued at today.

Not even $200 billion. It's hard not to feel bad for either companies. (Source)

For comparison:

Nvidia's success is good news for literally everyone, except gamers. The company's stock kept rising despite adisastrous launch involving the 40-series graphic cards, the most recent being the 4060 Ti. Bashed for its price-to-performance ratio, the graphic cards were unanimously derided by reviewers for being a slap in the face of consumers with its 8 GB VRAM and a limited generational uplift in performance when compared to its younger brother, the 3060 Ti.

But CEO Huang doesn't seem too bothered by the lack of sales for gaming graphic cards, which were down 38% year over year to $2.24 billion in the first quarter of 2023. In fact, at the recent Computex 2023 event in Taiwan, Huang spent more time talking about AI and the state of the global data center infrastructure than he did about graphic cards. Why care about gamers when the real money is to be had is in AI, right? Huang is richer, his company is more successful, and all is well with the world. And it's all thanks to AI 😉

Whether Nvidia's stock is over inflated, only time will tell. For now, the company is doing well for itself, with expectations that it will ultimately enter and remain in the trillionaire club.

Neither of Nvidia, Intel, or AMD trended on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings this week, but Microsoft, the backer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, was on the #4 spot.

In Other News.. 📰

• The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange is getting the FTX treatment. U.S. authorities filed a lawsuit against Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao for allegedly operating a "web of deception." Binance was trending #17 on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankings.
• Spotify laid off 200 people from its podcast unit.
• Japan has asked ChatGPT-creator OpenAI to not collect sensitive data without people's permission in training its machine learning algorithms.
• Twitter's head of brand safety and ad quality, A.J. Brown, has decided to leave the company, Reuters reported. Twitter was trending #57 on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankings.
• YouTube will no longer remove videos peddling false information about previous U.S. elections. The company ranked #21 on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankings.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends!

See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon