Nvidia Corp’s forecast for surging revenue surprised even the most bullish analysts on Wall Street, propelling the chipmaker to the cusp of a US$1 trillion market capitalization and igniting a global jump in stocks linked to artificial intelligence (AI).
The Santa Clara, California-based company gained as much as 29 percent in extended US trading, on course for a record high, after saying it expects sales to reach about US$11 billion 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.
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Nvidia, the biggest supplier of the advanced chips required to train a new generation of AI services, inflamed already lofty expectations for a burgeoning technology.
Its rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc jumped 10 percent, while its chip supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), rose as much as 3.8 percent in Taipei and equipment supplier Advantest Corp surged as much as 20 percent to an all-time high in Tokyo.
ASML Holding NV, which supplies gear to TSMC, gained more than US$6 billion in early trading in Europe. Along with memorychip maker SK Hynix Inc, they collectively gained more than US$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 would 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.
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.
Under chief executive officer and cofounder Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), Nvidia has positioned itself as the top provider of components for training AI software. That has 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 manufacturer 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,” he said.
Huang said that the use of the technology is only in its infancy and more tailored products for specific industries are needed.
He has built online services and software tools to help encourage the broader adoption of AI outside of his big customers — cloud providers such as Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services.
“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, Anvazadeh said.
US-based tech giant Google said yesterday that its efforts to build four underseas cables to connect Taiwan with the world had created more than 64,000 jobs and generated about US$26 billion in GDP for Taiwan as of 2021. The US company has transformed Taiwan into a strategic cloud infrastructure hub in the world. The four undersea cables are part of the company’s investments in cloud infrastructure in Taiwan, and on the back of the undersea cables, a data center and a Google Cloud Region, which is a geographic area in which Google provides infrastructure and services for deploying applications, Google said in
Huawei Technologies Co (華為) largely omitted mention of its controversial Mate 60 smartphone series at a grand showcase of its new consumer products yesterday. The Shenzhen-based company would increase smartphone production in response to demand, said consumer division chief Richard Yu (余承東), without naming the handset triggering that surge. The Mate 60 Pro earned international notoriety with its advanced made-in-China processor last month, causing concern in Washington about Huawei’s progress toward developing in-house chipmaking capabilities despite US trade curbs. Huawei’s new phones have fired up the company’s sales and were among the top sellers in China in the week before Apple Inc’s
SLUMP: The electronics, machinery and traditional industries posted the largest decline in the past year; overall, sectors showed gains over the previous month Taiwan’s industrial production index decreased 10.53 percent year-on-year to 91.38 last month, falling for a 15th consecutive month on an annual basis, as weak global economic growth continued to weigh on end-market demand and investment momentum, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Saturday. The industrial production index gauges output in Taiwan’s four main industries: manufacturing, electricity and gas supply, water supply, and mining and quarrying. Last month’s decline was the smallest contraction since March when the index dropped 16.03 percent from a year earlier. On a monthly basis, the index rose 7.28 percent, marking a second straight month of improvement,
Micron Technology Inc on Wednesday predicted a steeper loss than anticipated in the current quarter, indicating that an industry slump is still weighing on the largest US maker of memory chips. The company projected a fiscal first-quarter loss of as much as US$1.14 a share, excluding some items. Analysts had estimated a US$0.96 loss. On the bright side, revenue is expected to start recovering in the period. Micron predicted sales of US$4.2 billion to US$4.6 billion, compared with an estimate of US$4.21 billion. For Micron and competitors Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc, this year has been brutal. Customers in their