For a moment, it looked like the Nvidia rally might finally hit a wall. The stock had its worst day in months, Microsoft inked a deal with rival Intel, and Wall Street’s earnings expectations were sky-high.
Nvidia beat them anyway. And the AI chipmaker ended a wild week as the first chipmaker to be worth $2 trillion. Check out the slideshow above for the week in Nvidia news.
Nvidia made waves last week when it surpassed Amazon and Google parent Alphabet to become the third-most valuable company in the U.S. Thanks to the surge, even companies that the AI chipmaker has stakes in felt their own ripple effects of the interest in Nvidia. But this week, the tides have shifted. Nvidia stock on Tuesday had its worst day since October 2023
Microsoft is tapping semiconductor pioneer Intel in its ambitions to make more chips as it races to develop further AI models. The company plans to use Intel’s 18A manufacturing technology to make a future chip that has been designed in-house, Microsoft and Intel said Wednesday, but didn’t specify what the chip would be used for. For Intel, partnering with Microsoft — one of Nvidia’s biggest buyers of AI chips — will boost its made-to-order chip business as it competes with other leading chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Nvidia itself.
Nvidia reported revenues of $22 billion in the fourth quarter, up nearly 270% from the prior year and even above Wall Street’s soaring expectations. Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, the $30,000 chips that power generative AI products, have unleashed a buying frenzy from the biggest of big tech companies. Its largest purchasers are Microsoft and Meta — which spent $4.5 billion each on the chips last year — followed by Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, and Oracle.
Powered by surging demand from generative AI models, Nvidia late Wednesday reported a quarterly revenue increase of 265% compared to the prior year, earnings that beat big expectations and sent the stock of Wall Street’s hottest chipmaker surging anew. But darker clouds are looming over Nvidia’s China business: The country accounted for just a mid-single-digit percentage of its data center chip revenue, the company said, down from 19% in fiscal year 2023.
Nvidia is not only critical to big tech companies and governments developing their own AI platforms but also to the self-driving car market. Or at least the AI chipmaker’s executives think so. Colette Kress, Nvidia’s CFO, boldly stated on a call with investors Wednesday that “nearly every automotive company working on AI is working with Nvidia.” And company revenues from the automotive industry rose 21% to a record $1.1 billion last year.
This week’s been a wild card in the who’s who game played by the Magnificent Seven, and it’s all because of Nvidia. The seven so-called tech stocks — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, and Meta — usually take the same spots on a somewhat predictable ranking of the nation’s most valuable public companies. As a rule, Microsoft and Apple come before Alphabet and Amazon, which come before Nvidia. But that’s all been shaken up as the seven stocks made blockbuster gains, especially Nvidia.
Wall Street’s buzzing with talk of the hottest tech stock that just keeps getting hotter: Nvidia. The AI chipmaker beat investors’ sky-high expectations when it reported record fourth-quarter revenues of $22 billion — 270% more than the year before. Analysts at Bernstein, Rosenblatt, and KeyBanc raised their price targets for the stock to $1,000 or higher, while others bumped up their guidance more modestly.
The chipmaker powering the AI models taking the world by storm just made its own mark with a record valuation. Semiconductor firm Nvidia became the first in the chip industry to reach a $2 trillion valuation after shares of the company increased around 3% Friday morning — driven by the boom in the AI industry.
