Nvidia Set To Surpass $1tn As AI Surge Continues

Nvidia was set to become the first US chip firm to surpass $1 trillion (£810bn) in market capitalisation as its stock surged more than 4 percent in premarket trading on the US Nasdaq on Tuesday, buoyed by investors’ frenzy around generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT – which was itself trained on large numbers of Nvidia chips.

Facebook parent Meta also reached the $1tn milestone in 2021, although it is currently valued at $670bn as of Monday’s close, while Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are all trillion-dollar firms.

The graphics chip maker’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, unveiled Nvidia’s latest range of chips at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Monday, saying accelerated computing and generative AI have opened an era in which “everyone is a programmer”.

AI surge

ChatGPT is one of the generative AI tools that can create computer code from human-language prompts, a development Huang said is set to revolutionise programming.

Last week Nvidia revealed forecasts of rapid sales growth that exceeded analysts’ expectations by 50 percent, fuelling the current share price surge.

The company said demand has soared for its data centre chips, including the H100, an advanced GPU that can accelerate training for the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI.

The company’s shares have risen 172 percent since the beginning of the year amidst investor enthusiasm around AI, an industry whose top-end systems largely use Nvidia graphics chips as accelerators.

At Computex Huang announced a new AI supercomputer platform called DGX GH200 aimed at assisting tech firms in training generative AI models such as those used in OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Meta, Microsoft and Google Cloud are expected to be among its first clients.

Avatar intelligence

A new Nvidia supercomputer in Israel called Israel-1 is also focused on AI tasks.

Taiwan-born Huang showed a new GPU for gaming and an AI platform allowing developers to create enhanced online avatars that can interact with players in a more natural way.

A demonstration showed a player interacting with an AI-driven 3D animated character in a cyberpunk ramen shop by speaking to it in natural language, rather than selecting dialogue options as is more common in role-playing games.

“This is the future of video games. AI will contribute to the rendering and synthesis of the environment, but it will also animate the characters,” Huang said.