Only a handful of publicly traded companies—six, to be exact—currently hold a market capitalization of $1 trillion or more. It’s a small, gilded club, composed almost entirely of Silicon Valley’s biggest players (give or take a Saudi Arabian energy giant). Now, however, the club has a new member: longtime graphics card maker, hardware supplier, and self-described “world leader in artificial intelligence computing” Nvidia, which, in the midst of frenzied market excitement over AI, saw its value skyrocket this week.
On Tuesday, Nvidia’s stock price jumped to amazing new heights (as high as $418 a share), officially cresting a capitalization of $1 trillion and making it one of only nine public companies to ever reach such a status. The triumph represents a new high for a company’s whose stock has already shot up 165 percent since the beginning of this year. Just last week, Nvidia’s stock rose a startling 26 percent, after the company unveiled better-than-expected quarterly earnings that were tied to its central role in the ongoing “AI revolution.”
Historically, Nvidia has made its money in chips and software, churning out a variety of GPUs and APIs to supply computers across the world with necessary parts and programs. With the need for increased computing power to support new data-intensive programs like ChatGPT, Nvidia is positioned to reap the benefits of Silicon Valley’s new AI obsession. After all, its hardware makers like Nvidia that produce the infrastructure that make AI software even possible.
But the company has also invested in its own automated tools. Over the weekend, the company announced a number of new AI products, including a new “AI supercomputer”—the DGX GH200—that is designed to help companies develop their own large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Bard.
“We’re now at the tipping point of a new computing era with accelerated computing and AI that’s been embraced by almost every computing and cloud company in the world,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, at a computer conference in Taiwan on Monday. “DGX GH200 AI supercomputers integrate NVIDIA’s most advanced accelerated computing and networking technologies to expand the frontier of AI,” he proffered.
The industry frenzy over AI is ongoing, even as regulators worry that the technology could upend entire sectors of society. On Tuesday, a cadre of tech industry leaders once again came forward to warn that AI could lead to disaster if proper government regulations aren’t instituted.