Chip maker Nvidia is now worth more than Alphabet and Amazon thanks to the current AI boom.
Bloomberg reports that just a day after overtaking Amazon, the American chip maker hit a market capitalisation of about $1.83 trillion. This positions Nvidia above Alphabet, the parent company of Google, as the fourth most valuable company in the world.
Nvidia stock has gone supernova off the back of its stranglehold on the market for chips that power large language models (LLMs). The Nvidia H100 powers the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, while Microsoft and Meta have also been spending big on the company’s accelerators.
In a move that will be painfully familiar to PC gamers who tried to secure one of Nvidia’s graphics cards over the lockdown period, supplies of this H100 chip are severely constrained, which has inevitably forced the price up and bolstered Nvidia’s value.
The over-reliance on this H100 chip has prompted Nvidia’s major rivals to develop their own AI processors, so its charmed position might come under threat at some point in the not too distant future. However, the company isn’t exactly standing still itself, and is on the verge of launching the upgraded H200 with more memory capacity and bandwidth.
The Nvidia H200 is expected to launch in the second quarter of 2024. In other words, that value could well go up. Microsoft, Apple and Saudi Aramco (which occupy the top three positions) should probably be looking over their shoulders.
