Big tech companies are continuing to pour cash into artificial intelligence at a breakneck pace, and based on Nvidia’s earnings update Wednesday, much of it is going to the chip maker. “This last year, we’ve seen generative AI really becoming a whole new application space, a whole new way of doing computing,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive, said Wednesday. “A whole new industry is being formed, and that’s driving our growth.” After a year of supercharged spending, in a tech industry renowned for short-lived frenzies, some chip executives and analysts see the AI boom as increasingly sustainable. While it is the talk of Silicon Valley and a priority for big tech companies, AI has yet to percolate through the corporate world and become ubiquitous in everyday life, suggesting further opportunities for the companies that can harness them. “This is transforming everything about computing,” Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event Wednesday. For Nvidia, the strength of the boom was on full display Wednesday, when it reported quarterly sales of $22.1 billion and forecast another $24 billion for its current quarter, each more than triple their year-ago periods and ahead of Wall Street’s bullish expectations. Fueling that growth, tech companies have continued to plow money into AI in recent months. Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg boasted in January that he was planning to buy billions of dollars worth of AI chips from Nvidia this year. Google recently rolled out a new, more powerful version of its Gemini AI system. Microsoft has its own AI assistant tools and has bought tens of thousands of Nvidia’s most advanced chips. “Generative AI has kicked off a whole new investment cycle to build the next trillion dollars of infrastructure of AI generation factories,” Huang said. “We believe these two trends will drive a doubling of the world data center infrastructure installed base in the next five years and will represent an annual market opportunity in the hundreds of billions.”
Full report : NVIDIA’s blockbuster results and outlook signal that spending on AI hasn’t cooled after a red-hot year.