Nvidia Nailed Bet on AI Trend in Surge Toward $1 Trillion

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Nvidia Corp. has a knack for riding tech trends — selling graphics chips that powered everything from the video game boom to the rise of cryptocurrency and the industry's big bet on the metaverse.

But arguably no trend stands to benefit the world's most valuable chip company more than the rise of artificial intelligence. Nvidia's 24% surge on Thursday pushed it within grasp of a $1 trillion market capitalization, a level that would rank it among the tech elite including Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.

“I'd be reluctant to say it has won the race, but it is winning right now,” said Zeno Mercer, senior research analyst at ROBO Global.

Following an AI-fueled sales forecast this week that blew Wall Street targets out of the water, Nvidia's value grew $184 billion on Thursday. That was the third-biggest one-day gain in market capitalization in the US ever. Nvidia climbed an additional 2.5% on Friday, putting its valuation at $963.2 billion.

Nvidia was co-founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, who still runs the company. It proved more successful than its peers at developing chips that turn computer code into the realistic images that computer gamers love, and rode out a wave of consolidation that saw its rivals acquired, bankrupted or merged into larger companies.

Under Huang, the company then pushed its technology into new markets, such as data center servers and artificial intelligence processing — a move that's proving prescient today. In less than a decade, Nvidia's data center business has grown from $300 million in annual revenue to $15 billion. The chipmaker has won orders to equip giant computing factories by successfully arguing that graphics chips can handle AI workloads better than more standard