Seemingly overnight, computer chip designer Nvidia has become all Wall Street can talk about. The company added $230 billion in market value after a blockbuster earnings report Wednesday, breaking the stock market record that Meta set earlier this month and pulling the entire market along with it. Last week, it became the third-most valuable company on the planet.
The rise of AI is what’s generating so much buzz around Nvidia right now. The company has a near-monopoly on the processors needed to power the advanced computer systems that support ChatGPT and other machine learning systems. AI startups are desperate to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Nvidia’s processors, which are some of the only hardware systems that can handle the trillions of calculations needed to train the neural networks behind AI.
The story behind Nvidia’s all-in AI push goes back far beyond last quarter, though. Visionary CEO Jensen Huang has been quietly preparing the company to pivot to cutting-edge AI chips for well over a decade—ever since his days studying parallel computing, a predecessor to modern AI, at Stanford.
The computer gaming chips Nvidia made its name designing are built on the same technology as the AI chips Wall Street is so excited about, which has allowed the company to transition quickly and build a seemingly unstoppable lead in the AI chip race—it controls 70% of the market.
But analysts Fortune spoke with said that the real source of Nvidia’s domination isn’t hardware, it’s software. The CUDA coding platform Nvidia packages with all of its chips has become a must-use for the waves of developers working on AI projects right now, which will only strengthen its hold on the market as AI continues to grow.
Read my story on why Nvidia is dominating the AI chip race here. |
