Nvidia Is Crushing It

Asa Fitch, reporting for the WSJ:

Chief Executive Jensen Huang described AI as hitting “the tipping point” and indicated demand for the computing power that underlies AI remained astronomical. “Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” he said.

That demand showed up in the company’s results Wednesday. Sales more than tripled in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter from a year earlier and are projected to do so again in the current period. Earnings surged more than eightfold. The results exceeded analyst expectations.

Shares in the company rose 9% in off-hours trading.

That’s a big move for a company with a roughly $2 trillion cap.

In addition to ChatGPT, a number of other popular AI products have started to hit the market in recent months, including digital assistants for coding and business from Microsoft. Nvidia has transformed itself in the space of three years from a company focused on chips that help videogames run faster to the red-hot center of the AI boom.

Sometimes a company is in the right place at the right time for a pivot/industry shift. Apple was doing great in the 2000s, with the iPod and the Mac (especially after the switch from PowerPC to Intel) — and then the iPhone happened. Nvidia was (and remains) undeniably the leader in high-end gaming video cards, but now, truly suddenly, their gaming business is dwarfed by their data center AI hardware business.

Do great work and great things tend to happen. Or in the words of Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

★ Saturday, 24 February 2024