The chip company Nvidia benefits massively from the boom artificial intelligence
. With its sales forecast, the graphics card specialist exceeded the average expectations of the analysts by around 50 percent. Company boss Jensen Huang (60) spoke in a conference call with journalists on Thursday night about “incredible orders” for upgrading data centers. Nvidia chips and software are well suited for applications based on artificial intelligence. They are now geared even more towards AI applications.
Nvidia announced sales of around eleven billion dollars (10.25 billion euros) for the quarter running until the end of July. Analysts had expected an average of around $ 7.2 billion. The group is expanding strongly: too Nvidia is playing an increasingly important role in German industry with its applications and partnerships.
Investors responded enthusiastically. Nvidia shares jumped nearly 30 percent in US after-hours trading to hit a new record high. With a year-to-date gain of more than 200 percent, Nvidia shares lead the list of winners in the Nasdaq 100. Since the interim low in October, the stock has almost tripled.
Nvidia could match Apple’s daily record
On Thursday night, Nvidia’s stock market value rose by almost $220 billion to at times $970 billion. Most recently, it was still around 950 billion US dollars – making Nvidia worth almost six times as much as Germany’s most expensive stock exchange group SAP ($160 billion).
If this trend is confirmed and the gain remains at this level at the start of regular US trading, it would be the largest daily gain that a privately traded company has ever booked. The US group holds the previous record Apple, which gained $191 billion in stock market value within a day in November 2021. follow behind Amazon ($190 billion in February 2022), Microsoft ($150 billion in March 2020) as well Tesla ($143 billion in January 2022).
With a valuation of almost three trillion dollars, Apple is still the most valuable private stock exchange company in the world. Despite the recent price jump, Nvidia is still a long way from the trillion mark.
Quarterly sales down 13 percent
Last quarter, Nvidia’s data center technology sales hit a record high, up 14 percent to $4.28 billion. Originally developed for graphics cards, Nvidia technologies have a long history of doing the computing behind artificial intelligence applications.
In recent months, the chatbot ChatGPT and software that can generate images based on text descriptions have triggered a new AI hype. Many companies want to keep up with such applications, which increases the need for specialized technology in data centers.
Analysts are now wondering whether the surprisingly high sales forecast for the current quarter is an outlier or an indication of a permanently large Nvidia business. Huang emphasized that the use of artificial intelligence is just beginning.
Overall, Nvidia sales in the first quarter ended April fell by 13 percent to $7.19 billion. The main reason for this was a slump in business with graphics cards for personal computers. This shrank by 38 percent to 2.24 billion dollars. The PC market is currently running after the rapid sales at the beginning of the corona pandemic weak. On balance, Nvidia ended the quarter with a profit of $2.04 billion, up from $1.62 billion a year earlier.