Nvidia, Making it Real

Time for the Picks ‘n Shovels

NVIDIA brings it home

First, ChatGPT started the “Big Bang” last November. Now Nvidia followed with its own “Show me the Money” Bang, reporting their latest quarter this May.

Appropriate bookends on the LLM AI/ Generative AI (GAI) phenomenon about six months apart. An overnight success years and decades in the making. Over 7 times Intel’s market cap of $130+ billion thus far. 

Building on the solid underpinnings of Machine and Deep Learning (ML/DL), that have already helped collectively build tech businesses with a trillion plus dollars in revenues over the last decade plus. We wouldn’t be able to “Uber” anywhere without both, for example. 

Nvidia (NVDA) cemented its position in the global investor consciousness on AI of course, with its stellar quarter and guidance a few days ago. It joined an exclusive club  dominated mostly by Tech companies. They made AI Real.

Source: Visual Capitalist

Every analyst team on Wall Street has continued gushing and public & private  investors are rapidly on the hunt for the “next Nvidia”, up and down the AI Tech Stack. (Pro tip: for this year at least, the financial growth winners are likely the ‘picks ‘n shovels’ crowd at this early stage in this AI gold rush. 

And founder/CEO Jensen Huang made clear again after the quarter, how early all this really is and how AI technologies are really just getting started remaking everything around AI infrastructure.

As a weekend “read”, I would recommend his keynote at Computex 2023 in Taiwan. It’s worth the TL;DR watch to get the full story and impact. But here’s a good summary of key highlights as well to get the context. 

While in weekend reading mode, I would also recommend watching Microsoft CEO Satya Nadela’s keynote at Microsoft Build 2023 conference for AI developers from a few days prior if missed. It provides the bookend to Jensen’s excitement for the tech stack from Boxes one to six in the AI Staircase chart above. CoPilot coming to Windows soon, and Bing Search coming to its Partner OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Next week of course we’ll have Apple CEO Tim Cook’s take on AI as their Developer Conference WWDC 2023 kicks off Monday June 5. Especially interesting will be their take, if any, on their market leading Apple Silicon efforts, which offer different types of GPUs at the real Edge of the network,  on over two billion Macs, iPads and iPhones.  

Bottom line, GPUs are to AI what Gas is to Cars. Can’t go “Vroom, Vroom” without either in the ‘tank’. 

And as fast as the world has woken up to the opportunities around GAI and LLM AI, and the Chipmakers are ramping up production as fast as possible, it’s going to be at least a year or more before the Supply even begins to catch up with the Demand.

More on this in the next post. Stay tuned.