by Nvidia is poised to break Apple’s one-day capital increase record. And this thanks to the leaps and bounds of the market for semiconductors used in artificial intelligence applications.
According to Bloomberg, the world’s largest semiconductor maker has managed to increase its market capitalization by up to 29% in premarket trading. If the gain holds, its value will increase by $219 billion to an all-time high of $974 billion.
Breaks Apple’s record
That would surpass Apple’s $191 billion performance last November. Despite the latest leap, the company still remains outside the $1 trillion club, where Apple and Amazon are.
On track for a capitalization of 1,000 billion dollars.
According to the FT, however, Nvidia is on track to become the top chipmaker with a market capitalization of over $1 trillion. Unsurprisingly, chip vendors including Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC and Dutch OEM ASML also saw the largest gains, up 3.5% and 5% respectively.
Wednesday’s results bolstered Nvidia’s claim that it is the only company whose technology is capable of meeting industry-wide demand to create artificial intelligence with systems capable of creating human-like content. The group pointed to the “exponential growth” in demand for computing power from cloud and internet companies, as well as the automotive, financial services, healthcare and telecommunications sectors.
Products, including Nvidia’s most powerful H100 processor, have become sought after, not only by Big Tech companies, but also by a wave of AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised billions of dollars in venture capital in recent months.
The rise of artificial intelligence
“We are obviously seeing a huge increase in demand for artificial intelligence, and Nvidia is at the forefront of that,” said Geoff Blaber, managing director of technology consultancy CCS Insight, describing its chips. and associated software tools as “options”. of a “generational change in artificial intelligence”. “They are definitely in pole position because they provide a very complete tool chain that no other company can produce at the moment.”
Mini stock market rally
AMD, which like Nvidia makes specialty chips better suited to training massive datasets for artificial intelligence, rose 9% in pre-market trade, while Micron, the U.S. memory chip supplier faced to new trade restrictions in China amid escalating tensions with the United States, jumped 4% before the opening. Shares of Microsoft and Google also rose.
Several US and Japanese equipment suppliers to chipmakers are also moving higher. Tokyo Electron rose 3%, while Tokyo-based semiconductor test kit maker Advantest rose 16%. In the United States, Applied Materials and Lam Research were up slightly.
But Intel – which investors see as an AI laggard – fell 1% as investors bet AI would accelerate a fundamental shift in data center technology at cloud providers such as Microsoft. , Amazon and Google.
Nvidia’s “Blast”
Even before Thursday, Nvidia shares had doubled in 2023, as concerns last year about a slowdown in cloud spending following a pandemic-era Big Tech glut gave way to excitement. frantic for next-gen AI, driven by chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Although Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are investing in their own custom AI chips, analysts said few companies could match Nvidia’s technological lead.
Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said on Wednesday’s call with analysts that 15 years of investment and capacity expansion put Nvidia “in the right place at the right time” when ChatGPT launched a round. even greater investment from the world’s wealthiest corporations. .
“With genetic artificial intelligence becoming the primary workload of most information-generating data centers around the world, it is now clear that a data center’s budget is going to move very dramatically upwards. computing acceleration, and you see it now,” he added.
Source: OT.gr
