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Businesses The Almighty Buck United States

Nvidia Becomes Third Most Valuable US Company (cnbc.com) 75

Nvidia is now the third most valuable company in the U.S., surpassing Google parent Alphabet and Amazon. It's only behind Apple and Microsoft in terms of market cap. CNBC reports: Nvidia rose over 2% to close at $739.00 per share, giving it a market value of $1.83 trillion to Google's $1.82 trillion market cap. The move comes one day after Nvidia surpassed Amazon in terms of market value. The symbolic milestone is more confirmation that Nvidia has become a Wall Street darling on the back of elevated AI chip sales, valued even more highly than some of the large software companies and cloud providers that develop and integrate AI technology into their products.

Nvidia shares are up over 221% over the past 12 months on robust demand for its AI server chips that can cost more than $20,000 each. Companies like Google and Amazon need thousands of them for their cloud services. Before the recent AI boom, Nvidia was best known for consumer graphics processors it sold to PC makers to build gaming computers, a less lucrative market.

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Nvidia Becomes Third Most Valuable US Company

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  • by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Thursday February 15, 2024 @05:01AM (#64241080)

    It can only go higher.

    • So funny to watch bubbles inflate and pop.

      "AI server chips that can cost more than $20,000 each."
      Yeah.

      • Well, maybe they are space-grade, radiation-hardened AI chips, there's no price limit on these usually :)

        • by stooo ( 2202012 )

          What is the use case of such "space grade" trash ?

          • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            Allow humans to conquer the universe with AI space ships obviously.

          • Disposing of budget leftovers at the end of your project, if you cannot justify the expense in any other way.

          • Well, broadly, to be in space. No these gpus aren't that, it's obviously a joke, but sourcing parts designed to be out of the atmosphere is pricey and you get "old" stuff but at least they still work without the atmosphere shielding them.

          • What is the use case of such "space grade" trash ?

            Jewish space lasers.

      • AI that's so smart it figured out how much it's worth. When it hires its own agent and starts saying stuff like Let your people talk to my people and synergies well, you read it here on effin Slashdot

      • Except NVIDIA isn't the bubble. They're just a primary beneficiary siphoning money from the bubble. The people losing the most money will not be NVIDIA investors - it will be investors in the companies buying NVIDIA products. NVIDIA will just eventually have gradually declining sales when the bubble bursts. They won't have debt or bankruptcy to worry about.

        • The people losing the most money will be those who bought into the stock at the peak, just like the people who lost most money from buying Oracle stock were those, who bought it in the beginning of 2000 and sold it somewhere in the next 15 years or so.

          • But since it's ancillary to the bubble itself there should be a lot of time for a gradual decline rather than a full on crash. Anyone hanging on to the stock that long will have seen bankruptcy after bankruptcy of AI startups.

    • the reason the price is shooting up is that their tech is the basis for a massive automation boom. Tens of millions of jobs will be replaced by "AI". You're talking about replacing a $30-$50k a year worker with a $5000 video card.

      It's the same frenzy we had with self driving cars only this tech actually works. It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. Good enough is always good enough. You'll settle for the inferior product and service because you're trapped in a cycle. Automation layoffs put downwar
  • NVidia vs Google (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 ) on Thursday February 15, 2024 @05:45AM (#64241122)

    The price does seem rather bubbly, but I'd rather invest in a company that actually makes things that are competitive in the world marketplace than a company that makes nearly 80% of its revenue capturing and mining the personal data of its users to feed a parasitic advertising monster. No thanks.

    Do no evil.....uh huh.

    • I'd rather invest in a company that actually makes things that are competitive in the world marketplace than a company that makes nearly 80% of its revenue capturing and mining the personal data of its users to feed a parasitic advertising monster.

      While your morals/soul is good on this one.....me? I'll take whatever makes the money, and this train so far, has been great.

      I bought shares years ago...meant to buy more in past year or so, with seeing the AI think coming and the bitcoin thing dying a bit...wa

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 15, 2024 @05:56AM (#64241142)

    Nvidia worth 3x TSMC who make their chips? 5 years ago, Nvidia was trading at $39/share. Now they are at $739, a 1800% increase. Other tech companies have also done well - Microsoft's market cap is up 300% in the same time period, Meta is up about 200%, and Amazon has roughly doubled.

    Nvidia clearly has a lot of AI hype boosting its value, but when you consider that its earnings in 2023 were a relatively modest $27B, you wonder how it can be worth so much.

    • Stock markets are speculative... it doesn't have that much value but way to wreck a perfectly good hype train.

    • The faster its stock price goes up, the more valuable an investment it is, at least if you can sell before the price crashes again.

      • The faster its stock price goes up, the more valuable an investment it is, at least if you can sell before the price crashes again.

        Leveraging a pump-and-dump is not an ‘investment”. It’s just a tool being abused in a game that allows that kind of financial fuckery to be legal under the guise of “investing”. Hype is a synonym for bullshit.

        Weve seen IPOs from companies losing hundreds of millions and bragging how they’ve never been profitable, in a market valuing that “asset” at billions. Needless to say the tools fit the toolbox. We should expect regular crashes from now on, and just h

    • by sinij ( 911942 )

      Meta is up about 200%

      What have they done to justify such gains? They are modern AOL, the only thing that missing is mass-mailed CDs.

      • IDK but my dad and many others I know spend a lot of time on FB. Someone described it as being similar to the addictive game in the Star Trek TNG episode The Game (S5 E6).
      • by unrtst ( 777550 )

        Meta is up about 200%

        What have they done to justify such gains? They are modern AOL, the only thing that missing is mass-mailed CDs.

        Ooooooo! Don't give them any ideas! That could actually be a great marketing thing for them (maybe small usb drives though).

      • They are modern AOL

        Way smarter than AOL. Facebook might still exist, but they are putting lots of money into newer social networks for the kids too cool for Facebook. AOL didn't really do anything smart with investing. They bought Time Warner. An even OLDER media company. Because I guess they saw how Cable Internet and dial-up might be somewhat related? Meta could be doing a lot worse.

      • by hawk ( 1151 )

        >They are modern AOL, the only thing that missing is mass-mailed CDs.

        welli *am* finally running out of coasters. . .

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      As to it being way more than TSMC, it's true that TSMC is their fab partner, but nVidia has control of the gouging.

      nVidia can charge $20k for an H100 and their customer base will pay up because it would just suck to get left behind and everyone else has their shiny AI toy. If TSMC tried to gouge nVidia in a similar way, well, then nVidia might go to Samsung or Intel or hell, make their own fab, with hookers, and blackjack. Even if they have to take a hit on how advanced the manufacturing process is, they

      • make their own fab

        Considering global demand for fabrication and the current political climate, it would be hard to lose when building your own even if they continue contracts with TSMC. They would at least have themselves to fab for.

    • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Thursday February 15, 2024 @11:00AM (#64241942) Homepage

      Nvidia worth 3x TSMC who make their chips?

      TSMC doesn't really have a way to price gouge NVIDIA. NVIDIA gets most of the profits. From a manufacturing perspective, these chips aren't anything special compared to everything else TSMC makes. If NVIDIA were smart they would invest in their own fab now while they're massively overinflated. There's huge global demand anyway and they'll never regret it.

    • Nvidia worth 3x TSMC who make their chips?

      The owner of a gold mine is also worth more than the person who makes shovels. It's actually very common that companies are typically worth more than the suppliers. The ability to make chips is irrelevant if you don't know what it is you should make.

    • Nvidia worth 3x TSMC who make their chips? 5 years ago, Nvidia was trading at $39/share. Now they are at $739, a 1800% increase. Other tech companies have also done well - Microsoft's market cap is up 300% in the same time period, Meta is up about 200%, and Amazon has roughly doubled.

      Nvidia clearly has a lot of AI hype boosting its value, but when you consider that its earnings in 2023 were a relatively modest $27B, you wonder how it can be worth so much.

      There's not a lot of companies who deserve hype beyond their current earnings, but Nvidia is probably one of them.

      They've spent the last several years with more demand than they can satisfy, and the major ML frameworks are build on their drivers. As AI grows they are in a very good position.

  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Thursday February 15, 2024 @07:45AM (#64241308)
    Due to FOMO markets are chasing empty promises with crazy valuations. NVIDIA is a good company, but they are limited to making specialized hardware. Fundamentals of NVIDIA business are gaming and CAD acceleration, everything else is capitalizing on speculation. Crypto mining goes through huge boom and bust cycles and likely going to get regulated out of existence (due to both energy consumption and money laundering). Similarly LLM AI is currently all about potential applications, with no actual profitable business existing today. More so, NVIDIA is very open to geopolitical disruption, as they don't make their own chips. So with all of this, how could such valuation be reasonable?
    • Due to FOMO markets are chasing empty promises with crazy valuations.

      Due to the .bomb era humans are proving once again they never will fucking learn, and we deserve the next crash.

    • I find this post interesting because of how little it understands about the current technology landscape.

      > Fundamentals of NVIDIA business are gaming and CAD acceleration

      It's like you've been under a rock for 10 years. You may not be aware of this, but every reasonably sized company employs data scientists and analysts to do research on the company data. They use immense servers, usually provisioned on AWS or the like, that are accelerated using GPUs. The use Nvidia GPUs almost exclusively. Why? Beca

      • by sinij ( 911942 )
        TheStatsMan, can you please provide more explanation on why data analysis and modeling is no longer done by CPU clusters and instead are done on GPUs? My limited understanding that GPUs have advantage in the number of cores but limitation to what cores can do. Is writing specialized code to run on 2000 GPU cores provides better result than running generic code on 64 CPU cores, especially when you consider that GPU code requires more effort? Also, if massive number of cores is required by the enterprise, why
        • Certain models take a long time to train on CPUs. Nvidia has been working on this problem for years, and training those models using GPUs is much faster. If you're retraining models frequently, fitting models on CPU is simply not practical.

          It doesn't provide a "better result." The model is the same. It just does it much, much faster.

          • by sinij ( 911942 )
            Did data science moved away from statistical models to neural network-based models for most forecasting applications? Is this limited to specific fields, such as market forecasting and insurance, or more?
      • Nvidia is valuable because the market is pricing in the growth, demand, and requirements for more nvidia cards. But they aren't used for gaming anymore.

        About 15% of nvidia's GPU revenue still comes from consumer GPUs, the other 85% is datacenter so clearly you're more right than wrong, but they are still making quite a bit of money selling GPUs to people. About 15% of their total revenue also comes from Tegra, so corporate GPGPU sales are 85% of 85% of revenue.

        Most of that consumer demand is probably still gaming, though a significant percentage is surely home users of gaming GPUs to do GPGPU, whether accelerating video codecs or AI software like stable di

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Due to FOMO markets are chasing empty promises with crazy valuations. NVIDIA is a good company, but they are limited to making specialized hardware. Fundamentals of NVIDIA business are gaming and CAD acceleration, everything else is capitalizing on speculation. Crypto mining goes through huge boom and bust cycles and likely going to get regulated out of existence (due to both energy consumption and money laundering). Similarly LLM AI is currently all about potential applications, with no actual profitable business existing today. More so, NVIDIA is very open to geopolitical disruption, as they don't make their own chips. So with all of this, how could such valuation be reasonable?

      This means that when the AI boom busts, NVIDIA will be fine, it's the people HODLing NVIDIA that will be up shit creek, an RTX60xx paddle edition may be available.

      I've always thought the way we value companies, based on what they "theoretically" could be sold for is flawed.

  • Oh look - AMD seems to have funded an open source implementation of CUDA for their competitive chips (announced on Monday). Did that lock in just disappear? I really hope that NVidia can maintain that 50% margin with competition.
    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      Frankly, probably don't have too much to worry about. They are gouging people who are terrified of missing out on 'the' hot technology for AI. Even if they have CUDA compatibility (the project actually says they don't have ongoing AMD funding and might not keep up even), AMD will be perceived as the "knock-off" brand. These companies willing to shell out $20k for an H100 don't want to settle for "we have nVidia at home".

      They have a marketing lock-in that's going to be tremendously hard to overcome. A mu

    • by Calibax ( 151875 )

      Remember Psystar? Back in 2008 they started manufacturing an Intel based system with Max OS X preinstalled. Apple sued them into the ground.

      The recent announcement was simply a piece of code that allows AMD hardware to be compatible with CUDA. It doesn't replace CUDA, which is still required. Any company including that code is likely to go the way of Psystar.

  • I'm a leftist, I vote D, but I still can't help but think of the congresscreeps profiting when they make investments based on not just insider knowledge, but then go on to vote for the things that will cause their stock to go up. And the biggest winners seem to be Ds...

    • by sinij ( 911942 )

      I vote D, but I still can't help but think of the congresscreeps profiting when they make investments based on not just insider knowledge, but then go on to vote for the things that will cause their stock to go up. And the biggest winners seem to be Ds...

      You are part of the problem by enabling that behavior by continuing voting. Take a page out of conservative book and DINO and primary these shysters.

      • You are part of the problem by enabling that behavior by continuing voting. Take a page out of conservative book and DINO and primary these shysters.

        I'd love to not vote for them but the conservatives keep running people who will take away important rights right away. And Democrats don't seem to even believe in DINOs, though they are clearly not only real but dominant.

        • by sinij ( 911942 )
          Conservatives do not vote in Democratic primaries. What is your excuse for nominating insane warmongeres with obvious ties to the military-industrial complex to run for the office? Are you still going to blame conservatives if we all dies in a global thermonuclear war started by a chain of events motivated by Lockheed Martin wanting extra 20% profit this quarter?
          • What is your excuse for nominating insane warmongeres

            I didn't do it, I don't need an excuse. When I was offered the option I voted for Sanders in the primary, then they destroyed his attempt with fraud.

            Also, every Republican candidate is one of those, so eat my hot salty nuts.

        • I think you missed the word "primary" in their statement. You know, how a party selects their candidate for a race.

          • I think you missed the word "primary" in their statement. You know, how a party selects their candidate for a race.

            If the primary was how a party selected their candidate [thehill.com] then the dems would have wound up running Sanders. Instead the DNC fucked us all out of actual democracy, straight into a Trump presidency.

            I don't have personal knowledge of whether the whole process is a sham watched over by the illuminated and naughty, or if the Dems are just dumber than dogshit, or simply sufficiently corrupt and short-sighted that they'd rather throw the election if they can't have their chosen one on the ballot, but democracy is a

            • Must I always remind you, American is a Constitutional (re)public, not a mobocracy/democracy. Federal government has only those powers explicitly specified. All other powers default to individual citizen choice. The mob of Trotsky-sluts, NIKElooters and green-beaners --- even-IF a majority --- cannot force actions upon the federal government not assigned in the Constitution. Get the drift ? Those politicians who violate this constraint are felonious traitorous bastards and should be indited, tried, co
              • Ignoring your word salad, a Constitutional Republic has always been a form of democracy if not the primary form. Direct democracy is basically non existent. This is just a new talking point by conservatives because democracy sounds too much like Democrat and they don't like the word.

    • As if you needed special congressional knowledge to buy nvidia stock 2 years ago.

    • I'm a leftist, I vote D, but I still can't help but think of the congresscreeps profiting when they make investments based on not just insider knowledge

      Yep, good ol Pelosi and her time machine predicting an insane AI bubble a year out. All those damn Democrats passing ... what laws exactly to fuel the AI growth? Can you name one?

      I'm all for not having congress critters do any stock trading, but equating NVIDIA's current stock price with anything democrats have done, or implying that any of them knew about the AI bubble before it occurred is just outright dumb.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeT... [reddit.com]

  • Meta and Microsoft spent $70 billion on AI gear in the past 2 years combined. When they stop spending like they're on vacation after COVID, the revenue will dry up. Also, it will dry up when (not if) they smarten up and ship their own custom silicon cheaper. Furthermore, the trend of layoffs are bullshit because the megacorps have tons of cash and are making bank.

Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs, and only half wrong. -- Jim Gettys

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