In the first nine trading days of 2024, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) showed no signs of slowing down after its stock price climbed another 10% — increasing the company’s market capitalisation by US$128 billion (AU$197.3 billion) in the process.
Now, given the Santa Clara-based chipmaker’s recent US$600 billion (AU$925 billion) total surge achieved in the past two months, Bank of America’s chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett has pointed out its US$1.7 trillion (AU$2.6 trillion) valuation brings it level with every Chinese-listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange combined.
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“Hong Kong-listed shares are considered a good proxy for the Chinese market, as they meet international accounting standards and are directly accessible to brokerages worldwide,” explains Aruni Soni of Business Insider.
“China’s economic malaise has sent stocks tumbling lower. Lacklustre economic growth and a prolonged real-estate crash have weighed on the market. The country has also been dealing with deflation.”
Soni added: “The Hang Seng index, a benchmark for Hong Kong-listed Chinese stocks, has dropped 26% over the past year and 8% year-to-date.”
As we’ve previously outlined, 2023 was extremely kind to Nvidia. The company’s stock price rose by a staggering 240%, adding a casual US$800 billion (AU$1.2 trillion) to its market cap in the process. And clearly, the good times haven’t exactly stopped rolling — NVDA is up approximately 40% this year alone.
This has, of course, been a direct response to the ongoing artificial intelligence evolutions; Nvidia being a major player in the graphics processing units (GPU) game. And as demand for AI chips has soared, so too has the need for data centres.
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For reference, last year, Nvidia’s data centre revenue rose from a record US$4.28 billion (AU$6.6 billion) in Q1 to US$14.51 billion (AU$22.37 billion) in Q3 — this represents staggering growth of 217% in two quarters.
“This year, every industry will become a technology industry,” NVIDIA Founder & CEO Jensen Huang recently stated during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
Huang added elsewhere: “You can now recognise and learn the language of almost anything with structure, and you can translate it to anything with structure — so text-protein, protein-text. This is the generative AI revolution.”
