CES 2024: Nvidia Stock Surges After AI Graphics Card Launch

Shares in AI and graphics chip giant Nvidia closed at a record high on Monday after the firm introduced new graphics cards aimed at gamers.

The stock closed over 6 percent higher, crossing back over the $500 (£393) mark to value the company at just under $1.3 trillion.

Over the past year most chip makers have been mired in the industry’s worst downturn in decades, but Nvidia has largely avoided this due to its dominance of the surging market for the graphics chips that power AI servers.

The company’s chips also drive high-end videogames on users’ personal machines, and Nvidia’s announcements on Monday focused on these chips ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, which starts on Tuesday.

‘AI PCs’

Under the banner of “AI PCs” the company introduced three new desktop graphics chips aimed at enabling powerful AI features without the need to access remote servers.

The company priced the chips aggressively, saying it was offering a “great new price”.

The new GeForce RTX 4080 Super adds more processing cores and faster memory than its predecessor, allowing it to run Stable Diffusion XL image generation software 1.7 times faster than the equivalent model from Nvidia’s previous generation, the firm said.

The new chip can carry out ray tracing at 4K resolution, it said.

It goes on sale on 31 January for $999, which is $200 below the launch price of the earlier RTX 4080.

Speed boost

Nvidia also launched the RTX 4070 Ti Super for $799 and the 4070 Super for $599, which are to launch respectively on 24 January and 17 January.

Nvidia vice president Justin Walker said that when used with new software and optimised AI models the cards offer an “order-of-magnitude” performance boost over Intel-powered machines.

Graphics chip rivals AMD and Intel have also said they are targeting AI on PCs.

Nvidia’s stock price more than tripled last year amidst a surge of interest in generative AI, valuing it for the first time at more than $1tn and making it the most valuable company in the history of the semiconductor industry.