2023 was extremely kind to Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), seeing the company’s stock price rise by 240%, adding a casual US$800 billion (AU$1.2 trillion) to its market cap in the process. But the good times haven’t exactly stopped rolling.
In the opening weeks of this year alone, across the first nine trading days of 2024, the Nvidia stock price has climbed another 10%, increasing the company’s market capitalisation by an additional US$128 billion (AU$193.5 billion). The Santa Clara-based chipmaker’s valuation is now surging towards US$1.4 trillion (AU$2.1 trillion).
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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. For reference, last year, Nvidia’s data centre revenue rose from a record US$4.28 billion (AU$6.47 billion) in Q1 to US$14.51 billion (AU$21.94 billion) in Q3 — this represents staggering growth of 217% in just two measly quarters.
So it’s rather unsurprising that Nvidia has ridden the wave and is currently enjoying its strongest-ever start to a year.
They haven’t been alone in this prosperity, either. As per Forbes, the market also rewarded every major cloud provider from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) to Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL); and to some extent, the likes of Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) for its own creative tool-based AI innovations.
“This year, every industry will become a technology industry,” NVIDIA Founder & CEO Jensen Huang recently stated during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
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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.”
At time of writing, Nvidia is the fifth most valuable company in the US behind Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon; the sixth most valuable company in the entire world behind all of the above plus Saudi Aramco at #3. NVDA is currently trading at a touch under US$550 (AU$830) per share.
