Are investors buying Nvidia’s latest A.I. vision?
Nvidia’s stock has soared more than fivefold since ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, a rally that has vaulted the chipmaker into the trillion-dollar market cap club on the back of investor fervor for artificial intelligence — and the high-end processors that power these models.
But shares in Nvidia are down in premarket trading on Tuesday after investors gave the first day of the company’s annual developer conference (known as “A.I. Woodstock”) a tough grade. That’s even after the semiconductor company introduced its latest chip, which is capable of running increasingly complex computing models.
Big money is expected to continue flowing into A.I. Nvidia and its peers (and their shareholders) have been the first to profit from this investment shift. But during a two-hour keynote speech on Monday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., painted a vision of A.I. turbocharging computing power, leading to a boom in robotics, autonomous transport, concierge-style retail, and drugs discovery.
The new chip, Blackwell, will be “the engine to power this new industrial revolution,” he said. To underscore that, Nvidia recruited more than 100 customers — including from Amazon and the U.S. Army — to show off how they’re using the company’s hardware in their businesses.
“One hundred trillion dollars of the world’s industries are represented in this room today,” Huang said to cheers from the packed SAP Center in San Jose, Calif. (Huang said that the event was no rock concert, before making a joking reference to Taylor Swift, who has performed there.)
One big new customer is the Novo Nordisk Foundation, a top shareholder in the highly profitable Ozempic weight-loss drugmaker. The foundation and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark announced that they would invest about $100 million in a new supercomputer powered by Nvidia chips and software.
Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, the foundation’s C.E.O., told DealBook that the computer would be the most powerful of its kind in Europe, and would tackle “some of the world’s biggest challenges” in health care, climate science, and the green transition.
That may include drug discovery: While it took researchers over a decade to come up with the class of drugs that includes Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, advanced technology could take years off that process, Thomsen said. “The performance of generative A.I. is lifting the whole pharmaceutical science to a new level,” he said.
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