NVIDIA Hits $1 Trillion Market Cap as CEO Discusses Possibility of Switching to Intel for Next-Gen GPUs

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Image: NVIDIA

Celebrations may be in order for NVIDIA executives and the company’s long-time investors, as multiple outlets are reporting that the GPU giant managed to hit a $1 trillion market cap at the start of trading Tuesday—an exciting milestone that has only been claimed by a small club of tech companies that include Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon. “NVIDIA forecast $11 billion in sales for the second quarter of fiscal 2024 alone. The expected sales were 50% higher than consensus estimates of $7.15 billion,” CNBC noted this morning, with the higher-than-expected numbers owed to the apparently increasing demand in hardware for artificial intelligence applications and other trends. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who is probably in good spirits right now, also mentioned that he is open to the possibility of tapping Intel to manufacture its next-generation GPUs after being satisfied by the CPU maker’s latest work.

“You know that we also manufacture with Samsung, and we’re open to manufacturing with Intel. Pat [Gelsinger] has said in the past that we’re evaluating the process, and we recently received the test chip results of their next-generation process, and the results look good,” Huang said during a question and answer session in Taipei, Taiwan.

From a CNBC report:

The stock rose nearly 6% in late morning trading, hitting a fresh 52-week high.

The chipmaker’s shares rocketed last week after it posted quarterly earnings with top- and bottom-line numbers that significantly beat consensus estimates. Nvidia’s gain buoyed other chipmakers, with the notable exception of Intel, and was also fueled in part by estimates that were more optimistic than expected.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are critical to generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. The company has historically been a leader in the so-called discrete or stand-alone GPU field, but until recently, many consumers thought of GPUs as primarily used for intensive gaming.

From a Tom’s Hardware report:

Huangs remarks come nearly a year after he first signaled that Nvidia was in talks with Intel’s Foundry Services (IFS) to manufacture some of its chips, which is made possible by Intel’s recent shift to an IDM 2.0 model that will see it making chips for other companies with its latest process nodes.

Naturally, Intel will create its own test chips based on its own designs to share data with its customers about the health of the process node, so it isn’t a given that the chip bears an Nvidia design. Huang didn’t specify whether or not the test chip results came from silicon based on Nvidia’s architectural design, or which process node was tested.

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Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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