Pablo PardoWashington Correspondent

Washington Correspondent

Updated Thursday, February 22, 2024-22:27

  • Nvidia companies triple its turnover thanks to the "boom" of artificial intelligence

One of the phrases that remained from the California gold rush is that those who made the most money were not the gold prospectors, but the shovel sellers.

The anecdote has once again taken on a life of its own 176 years after the first gold nuggets appeared in the Sierra Nevada of the State, to refer to what seems like another purely Californian gold mine: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

And, on this occasion, the company that sells the "shovels" - in this case, the microchips -, Nvidia, seems to be the one that is taking more money than the developers of the new technology, starting with its most emblematic company, OpenIA. , is still in the red.

This is how Nvidia seemed last night, with an hour to go until Wall Street closed, on track to break the record for the increase in market capitalization of a company on the stock market.

Its value had risen by 250,000 million dollars (231,000 million euros) since the market had opened, which means, adapted to the Ibex metric, that the company had earned almost as much as everything worth Inditex, Banco Santander and BBVA.

The previous record for the rise in stock market value in one day was 205,000 million dollars (189,400 million euros), and had been reached on February 2 by Meta, the former Facebook, one of the companies that, precisely, are looking for the 'gold' of AI with Nvidia's 'shovels'.

These 'shovels' are above all the GPUs (the acronym in English for Data Processing Units), which are the microchips that Generative AI needs.

Ndivia has practically a world monopoly in the manufacture of these products, with a global market share of 80%.

When the company presented its results on Wednesday at the market close, investors' great fear was that it was losing share due to the entry of competitors into that market.

But the numbers overturned even the most optimistic expectations.

Nvidia's revenue exceeded forecasts by $2 billion, and its earnings per share exceeded market consensus by more than 20%.

Not even the limitations imposed by Joe Biden's Government on the export of advanced microprocessors to China, which directly impacts Nvidia's line of business, managed to sour the party, although the company admitted that they had had an impact in the quarter by limiting its supply of products to that country.

Right now, the only thing limiting Nvidia's growth is its ability to produce AI chips.

In other words: demand exceeds supply.

And no one else seems in a position to fuel that interest in advanced microchips, of which the company hopes to launch at least one new one this year.

As Nvidia co-founder, president and CEO, Taiwanese immigrant Jensen Hsuan, said, "a new industry is being born," referring to AI, "that is driving our growth."

A new industry whose big players are all Americans, with the exception of some Taiwanese, such as Taiwan Semiconductor, and in which there is only one European company, the Dutch ASML.

Just as Cisco did the internet infrastructure in the 1990s - and the market rewarded it for it - Ndivia is now doing the "screws" of AI, and its stock market award is historic.

At this rate, it seems only a matter of time before the microchip company co-founded just 30 years ago by Taiwanese immigrant Jensen Hsuan, who is also president and CEO, will surpass the Saudi oil monopoly Saudi Aramco and become the second most valuable company in the world, behind Microsoft (more than 3 billion dollars) and Apple (more than 2.9 billion).

Yesterday, Nvidia pushed up all of the NASDAQ, the US stock market dominated by technology companies, and especially its competitors, such as ASM.

But none could come even close to the more than 15% that the company led by Hsuan had risen, who, thanks to the fact that the price of Ndivia has multiplied by seven in the last four years, already has an estimated equity of 8.5 billion of dollars (7.98 billion euros).

Nvidia already surpassed Alphabet and Amazon yesterday, (formerly Google), and was less than 70 billion away from breaking the psychological barrier of two trillion dollars (1.84 trillion euros) in stock market value.

At this rate, it seems only a matter of time before this company, which is only 30 years old, will surpass the Saudi oil monopoly Saudi Aramco and become the second most valuable company in the world, behind Microsoft (more than 3 billion dollars). ) and Apple (more than 2.9 billion).

Ndivia even managed to buy into the Wall Street adage that says "don't fight the

Fed

," because its results and the rise in its shares beat the market's downward trends after the population of the minutes of the last policy meeting The central bank's monetary policy will hint that interest rates will not begin to fall until June.

When a company beats the

Fed

, it is to be taken very seriously.