Just 9 months after the birth of the first "trillion dollar" chip company in the US stock market, the first "two trillion dollar" chip company was born in the US stock market.
On March 1st, the US stock market had a good start to March, and Nvidia's stock price also surged by nearly 4%. As of the close of the day, its market value had broken through the $2 trillion mark for the first time. Since the beginning of this year, Nvidia's stock price has risen by nearly 70%.
On May 30th last year, Nvidia's market value broke through $1 trillion, creating a history in the chip industry. Since its listing in 1999, Nvidia has taken almost 24 years to become a company with a market value of trillions of dollars; And achieving a leap of $1 trillion to $2 trillion took Nvidia just 9 months and set a historical record. It took over two years for both Apple and Microsoft to increase their market capitalization by $1 trillion.
In the past nine months, the field of artificial intelligence has undergone tremendous changes, and the explosive growth in global demand for AI computing power is the fundamental factor driving Nvidia's stock price out of a vertical line. Nvidia's founder and CEO, Huang Renxun, has also become one of the most highly regarded figures among tech billionaires. His every speech and product release is a guiding indicator for the development of artificial intelligence technology.
Generative AI is the most important computing platform
In his opening speech at the COMPUTEX conference held in May last year, Huang Renxun unveiled a super large-scale generative AI accelerated computing platform for all industries, showcasing the forefront of AI accelerated computing and network technology.
Huang Renxun had already stated at the time, "People are at a turning point in a new era of computing, where accelerated computing and artificial intelligence have been accepted by almost all computing platforms and cloud service providers around the world."
When Huang Renxun mentioned generative AI, he said that it is the most important computing platform of our era. "With generative AI, now everyone can become a programmer," said Huang Renxun. "They just need to talk to the computer, and new features and applications will emerge endlessly."
He also expressed interest in embodied AI and referred to it as a new type of artificial intelligence that can drive the next wave of artificial intelligence.
Last June, Nvidia partnered with cloud data analytics company Snowflake with the goal of enabling customers in financial institutions, healthcare, and retail to use their own data to build artificial intelligence models.
Huang Renxun said at the annual Snowflake summit, "Data is so valuable to companies that when you have a large amount of data like Snowflake, you can transfer calculations to it." He stated that in this situation, Nvidia is taking an "engineering intensive" approach by embedding the NeMo platform used for training and running generative AI models into the Snowflake data cloud.
Last August, Huang Renxun appeared again at the Google Cloud Technology Conference Google Cloud Next. In a "fireside conversation" with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, Huang Renxun said, "We are at a turning point where the combination of accelerated computing and generative AI will drive innovation at an unprecedented speed. Nvidia's expansion of cooperation with Google Cloud will help developers accelerate their work speed through infrastructure, software, and services that improve energy efficiency while reducing costs."
In the same month, Nvidia released its quarterly financial report and opened a steady upward path for its stock price. The second quarter financial report at that time showed a year-on-year surge of 422% in net profit, 171% in revenue, and a gross profit margin of 71.2%, which is rare for hardware products.
Huang Renxun said, "Approximately $1 trillion worth of data centers, including the cloud, have been installed worldwide. Billions of dollars worth of data centers are transforming into the ability to accelerate computing and generative artificial intelligence. Companies around the world are transitioning towards accelerated computing and generative artificial intelligence."
Last October, Huang Renxun appeared in Taipei. He announced at Hon Hai's "Technology Day" that he will support manufacturing giant Foxconn in building an "AI factory". Foxconn hopes to use Nvidia's artificial intelligence software and hardware integration platform to produce intelligent cars. Huang Renxun stated that "artificial intelligence factories" will become the "accelerator" for new manufacturing enterprises to convert data into profits. The large-scale deployment of Nvidia GPU systems in manufacturing factories, including HGX, GH200 superchips, etc., can provide power for various industrial applications.
In the same month, Nvidia cancelled the offline meeting originally scheduled for the annual AI summit in Tel Aviv, and Huang Renxun had originally planned to give a keynote speech at the AI summit.
At the end of November last year, Huang Renxun attended the reinvent 2023 conference held by Amazon Cloud Technology (AWS) in Las Vegas. Nvidia expanded its cooperation with AWS, which will provide customers with access to Nvidia's latest AI chip H200.
The technology industry is still several years away from AGI
Starting from the second half of last year, the United States increased its control over the export of Chinese chips. Nvidia's previously customized H00 and A800 artificial intelligence chips for China have been listed as prohibited products.
In response, Huang Renxun stated at a DealBook conference in The New York Times in November last year that for American chip manufacturers, there is at least ten years left until they completely separate from China and achieve chip "supply chain independence".
"The independence of the chip supply chain is definitely something that American chip manufacturers should consider, but it is not something that will truly happen within one or two years," said Huang Renxun. He also stated that Nvidia's chip technology has been leading Chinese chip manufacturers for at least ten years.
Huang Renxun once again expressed his views on the rapid development of artificial intelligence. He predicts that within 5 years, artificial intelligence is expected to reach a level comparable to human intelligence. When talking about General Artificial Intelligence (AGI), Huang Renxun stated that although the development speed of large models is very fast, it is not equivalent to AGI, although they are very related.
He said, "One of the reasons why the technology industry is still several years away from general artificial intelligence is that although machine learning is currently proficient in tasks such as recognition and perception, it is still unable to perform multi-step reasoning, which is a top priority for companies and researchers, and everyone is working hard towards it."
Last December, Huang Renxun conducted visits to Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and Nvidia announced a partnership with Malaysia's YTL Group to build AI infrastructure. Huang Renxun stated in a media interview in Singapore that the company is working closely with the US government to ensure that new chips targeting the Chinese market comply with export restrictions.
In January this year, Huang Renxun appeared in Chinese Mainland for the first time after the outbreak of the epidemic, attended Nvidia China Annual Conference, and visited several offices in China. When he learned that employees did not dare to make his schedule for attending the annual conference public, Huang Renxun said: "Happy time should be shared with everyone." So, he wore photos and videos of Northeast flower dance Yangko on the Internet.
Last month, Nvidia released its latest quarterly financial report, which once again amazed the market. The report showed that Nvidia's data center business revenue surged by over 400%. In response to investors' concerns that Nvidia may not be able to maintain this rapid growth level throughout the year, Huang Renxun said, "Fundamentally, we believe that the conditions for sustained growth in 2025 and beyond will still be very good. Due to generative artificial intelligence and the entire industry's shift from CPUs to GPUs, the demand for Nvidia GPUs will remain at a high level."
Huang Renxun also stated that the demand for AI chips is still difficult to meet, and Nvidia's data center revenue is affected by the recent US restrictions on exporting advanced artificial intelligence semiconductors to China. Nvidia is providing samples to Chinese customers.
In a recent in-depth interview with Wired, Huang Renxun stated that Nvidia is already a platform enterprise. He also revealed that a new generation of GPUs is about to be released, and this chip named Blackwell will have excellent performance. Nvidia is expected to announce new developments in its related products at the GTC Summit to be held on the 18th of this month.