AI billionaire crowns 'whole new industry' amid 'tipping point' after his company passes Google for third most valuable in the world
Jensen Huang, cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, is walking on cloud nine. After turning in another stellar earnings report that had Wall Street celebrating on Wednesday, Huang’s semiconductor giant was able to retake its position as the world’s third most valuable company from Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Nvidia shares surged over 15% in early trading on Thursday, with the chipmaker’s blowout quarter convincing investors that the AI revolution will continue to boost the company for years to come. Huang talked up the rise of AI and his company’s role in what some have called the modern gold rush on the Wednesday post-earnings conference call. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point,” he told investors. “Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries, and nations.”
Huang, whose net worth is now over $60 billion, highlighted the ongoing shift from general-purpose computing to “accelerated computing” at data centers as one of the keys to Nvidia’s success, arguing it’s “a whole new way of doing computing”—or even “a whole new industry.”
All of the recommendation and personalization features in modern applications are driven by what Huang calls “tokens” for AI companies. From biotech startups that are generating new proteins and chemicals to OpenAI’s new generative AI text-to-video system called Sora, Nvidia’s AI tokens are indispensable for the modern tech world. Just look at the numbers: Revenue exceeded estimates by a whopping $2 billion as companies gobbled up all the tokens on offer.
“For the very first time, a data center is not just about computing data and storing data and serving the employees of a company,” Huang said on the call. “We now have a new type of data center that is about AI generation, an AI-generation factory.”
AI-generation factories
Huang explained that these AI-generation factories are all about taking in data and producing what he calls tokens for AI companies. “These tokens are what people experience on the amazing ChatGPT or Midjourney or search [engines],” he said.
Nvidia’s tokens are also, according to Huang, driving the company’s growth. To his point, the birth of AI-generation factories has led to intense demand for Nvidia’s chips. So intense that the company had to address how it decides who can buy its products on its earnings call, promising that the process is done “fairly.”
After Nvidia’s strong earnings report, Huang wasn’t afraid to make some bold claims about the importance of his company’s products either. “My guess is that every enterprise in the world, every software enterprise company … will run on Nvidia AI Enterprise,” he said. “So this is going to likely be a very significant business over time. We’re off to a great start.”
Lofty expectations
To say Wall Street has high expectations for Nvidia over the next year would be understating it. The median analyst forecast for the chipmaker is $832 (and rising, as analysts continue to alter their price targets post earnings), according to data from the Wall Street Journal. That represents a 24% jump from Nvidia’s pre-earnings stock price.
“While the stock has doubled since its 2021 high, the world has changed since then, and there is significant demand for artificial intelligence, and thus, Nvidia has plenty more room to run,” James Demmert, chief investment officer, Main Street Research, told Fortune, adding that he expects Nvidia shares to reach $1,000 in the next 12 months.
There are some Nvidia doubters still out there. Gil Luria, a senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson, argued that even if Nvidia continues to “dominate” the AI chip market over the next year, eventually, it’s likely to see a decline in demand for its products. Luria noted that some of Nvidia’s biggest customers, including its fellow Big Tech peers, have said that they are accelerating their AI spending this year in an initial push to catch up with demand for AI services, but that means a spending slowdown could be coming in 2025.
“We believe that customers like Microsoft are not interested in indefinitely sustaining this level of capex dedicated solely to AI compute, yet alone Nvidia,” he wrote. “Consequently, we believe our FY26 and FY27 estimates reflect a Street low, as we see potential for a sequential decline in Nvidia’s data center business starting sometime over the next four to six quarters.”
Luria has a “neutral” rating and a $620 12-month price target for Nvidia stock, and he isn’t the only analyst preaching caution when it comes to AI chipmakers’ long-term growth prospects. On Wednesday, BCA Research chief strategist Dhaval Joshi told Fortune’s Paolo Confino that we’re in “an AI bubble” and investors’ expectations for continuous, monumental earnings growth may be unreasonable.
“The market is saying: ‘Hey, the baton is going to be passed on now to generative AI, and that will continue the trend for the next five to 10 years.’ I’m very cynical about that,” he said.
