Nvidia Corp.’s forecast for surging revenue surprised even the most bullish analysts on Wall Street, propelling the chipmaker to the cusp of a $1 trillion market capitalization and igniting a global jump in stocks linked to artificial intelligence.
(Bloomberg) — Nvidia Corp.’s forecast for surging revenue surprised even the most bullish analysts on Wall Street, propelling the chipmaker to the cusp of a $1 trillion market capitalization and igniting a global jump in stocks linked to artificial intelligence.
The Santa Clara, California-based company gained as much as 29% in extended US trading, on course for a record high, after saying it expects about $11 billion of sales in the three months ending July. That gain puts Nvidia on track also to rack up the biggest one-day valuation jump in US company history.
Nvidia, the biggest maker of the advanced chips required to train a new generation of AI services, inflamed already lofty expectations for a burgeoning technology. Rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. jumped 10%, while its suppliers from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to Advantest Corp. also climbed. ASML Holding NV, which supplies gear to TSMC, gained more than $6 billion in early trading in Europe. Along with memory chipmaker SK Hynix Inc., they collectively gained more than $260 billion of value in a market otherwise preoccupied with concerns about the US debt limit and China’s economic slowdown.
Investors this year have doubled down on wagers that the viral success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other bots will usher in a new era of spending on the technology that underpins AI. Nvidia’s chips excel at parallel processing, making them well suited for training software by bombarding it with data.
Nvidia “provided blow-out guidance, powerfully underscoring the bull thesis that this company sits at the heart of one of tech’s seminal transition points,” said Adam Crisafulli, founder of newsletter Vital Knowledge.
Read more: Nvidia Soars After AI-Fueled Forecast Shatters Expectations
The market exuberance drove home growing anticipation around the advent of next-generation AI, which executives around the world have variously likened to the emergence of the internet and the iPhone. ChatGPT’s viral debut in November touched off a global race to develop similar services that can generate content — everything from poems to algorithms and pictures — with a few user prompts.
While the jury is out on which AI service will eventually end up on top, many investors are betting at least that that research and spending splurge will drive the companies that provide components essential to AI development and hosting.
TSMC, which manufactures Nvidia’s chips, rose as much as 3.8% in Taipei. Equipment supplier Advantest surged as much as 20% to an all-time high in Tokyo, while Hynix advanced up to 6.8% in Seoul.
Under Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Jensen Huang, the company has positioned itself as the top provider of components for training artificial intelligence software. That’s helped it weather a broader slowdown in technology spending.
Investors were looking to Nvidia for evidence that the surge in interest in AI this year is resulting in higher sales of chips that provide the computing power. The semiconductor maker delivered that with a revenue forecast for the current quarter that dwarfed the average analyst estimate.
“The transformational surge in AI spending is paying off much earlier than expected,” Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore wrote in a note. “We simply have no historical precedent for the magnitude of this step function.”
Nvidia’s Huang argued that the use of the technology is only in its infancy and more tailored products for specific industries are needed. He’s built online services and software tools to help encourage the broader adoption of AI outside of his big customers — cloud providers like Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS.
“Truly spectacular orders coming through for NVDA’s A100 and H100 AI chips,” said Amir Anvarzadeh, a strategist at Asymmetric Advisors Ltd. in Singapore. “More importantly for Asian equity investors, they point out that all the orders are being passed on to TSMC,” which has “more than adequate” capacity to fill the orders.
–With assistance from Winnie Hsu.
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