Nvidia, now worth more than Google, gears up to report as AI chip rivals crash its solo party

It’s pronounced en-vidia… and companies are en-vious. Nvidia will report earnings on Wednesday after surpassing Alphabet last week as the US’s third-most-valuable company behind Microsoft and Apple (it’s worth $1.8T — yeah, trillion). The chip titan, once known mostly for its sophisticated graphics cards for gaming consoles like Nintendo's Switch, is now synonymous with AI computing.

• Shovels for the gold rush: Nvidia’s AI chips have become the gold standard for large language models (including OpenAI’s ChatGPT), and as of August made up 70% of global AI-chip sales.

• Nvidia stock has more than 3X’d over the past year as tech giants raced to buy its supercomputing tech. Meta alone spent an estimated $9B+ on Nvidia chips.

• AI can see your halo: Because Nvidia doesn’t manufacture its own chips, the companies it relies on for production have seen a halo-effect boost. Shares of TSMC (which makes Nvidia semiconductors) and ASML (which supplies TSMC) have gained.

• The #s: In November, Nvidia reported that Q3 revenue had tripled to a record $18B, while profit was up over 1,200%. This week, Nvidia expects to report ~$20B in Q4 sales.

The easy days may be over… Nvidia was positioned to dominate the early days of the genAI boom thanks to its powerful graphics processors. Now competitors are catching up: shortly after Nvidia intro’d a new version of its genAI chip in November, rivals Intel and AMD announced their own AI chips. Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft all said they’d use AMD’s chip, which CEO Lisa Su described as the industry’s “most advanced AI accelerator.” Meanwhile, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are cookin’ up their own AI chips. Google said it trained its Gemini AI model on its own processors, not Nvidia’s.