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.
Photo: Reuters
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.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last