Nvidia (NVDA) founder and CEO Jensen Huang is climbing quickly on the rich list as the artificial intelligence hype continues to boost his company’s chip business. After Nvidia reported record earnings for the latest fiscal quarter yesterday (Aug. 23), Huang’s net worth rose $3.2 billion overnight to $42 billion, putting him among the 30 wealthiest people on the planet, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Huang, 60, is now the world’s richest semiconductor entrepreneur and is only $300 million behind Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance.
For the quarter ended July, Nvidia reported record-high revenue of $13.5 billion, up 101 percent from a year ago, and a profit (adjusted) of $6.74 billion, or $2.70 per share, up 429 percent from a year ago. Both figures beat already lofty analyst estimates and sent Nvidia shares up more than 9 percent in yesterday’s after-hours trading.
Nvidia’s stock price is up 234 percent this year, giving the company a market cap of $1.18 trillion, roughly ten times the market value of rival chipmakers Intel, AMD (AMD) and Qualcomm. Nvidia is not the sixth most valuable company in the world behind Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Saudi Aramco, Alphabet (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN).
What’s behind Nvidia’s monstrous rally?
Nvidia’s strong sales in the latest quarter were driven by its data center business, which includes A.I. chips. In the past quarter, data center sales accounted for 76 percent of the company’s total revenue and were up 171 percent from a year ago.
Nvidia’s A100 and H100 A.I. chips are used to build and run A.I. applications like ChatGPT. It has been reported that OpenAI trained ChatGPT on 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), a popular type of A.I. chip, and the chatbot could end up needing 30,000 such GPUs as it readies for commercialization, according to market research company TrendForce.
It’s estimated Nvidia owns 95 percent of the global GPU market and the demand seems limitless. “The world has something along the lines of about a trillion dollars worth of data centers installed, in the cloud, enterprise and otherwise,” Huang told analysts on a call yesterday (August 23). “That trillion dollars of data centers is in the process of transitioning into accelerated computing and generative A.I.,” which Huang identified as the two most important trends in computing today.
“I think this is not a near-term thing,” Huang added. “This is a long-term industry transition and we’re seeing these two platform shifts happening at the same time.”
Nvidia intends to keep its dominance in this booming industry. The company expects to grow revenue for another 170 percent on a year-over-year basis to $16 billion in the current quarter ending October, higher than analysts’ forecast of $12.61 billion.
