Nvidia stock surges as CEO touts ‘insane’ demand for new Blackwell AI chips
Nvidia is still the only game in town for companies spending hundreds of billions in the AI arms race—and both the firm’s customers and investors are well aware of that. The latest reminder came on Thursday when, on an otherwise tough morning for stocks, Nvidia shares jumped over 3% after CEO Jensen Huang touted blistering demand for its next-generation Blackwell line.
Huang’s comments on Wednesday coincided with a company announcement that it is partnering with IT consulting giant Accenture to sustain corporate AI adoption.
Nvidia controls roughly 90% of the market for advanced AI chips. The company has been shipping as many of its now-famous GPUs, which are all but essential for firms training AI models, as it can make. Huang admitted earlier this month that managing customer relationships can be “emotional.”
Clients see acquiring Nvidia’s product as a zero-sum game: Chips bought by the competition are vital inputs they waste time waiting for. That’s likely even more true for the Blackwell chips, which are bigger and more powerful than those in the current Hopper lineup.
“Blackwell is in full production, Blackwell is as planned, and the demand for Blackwell is insane,” Huang told CNBC on Wednesday. “Everybody wants to have the most, and everybody wants to be first.”
Reports of design flaws and engineering snags delaying Blackwell’s rollout may have weighed on the stock in recent months, but Nvidia is expected to begin selling the chips at the end of this year.
The insatiable demand should not be a surprise, Angelo Zino, a senior vice president and tech equity analyst at CFRA Research, recently told Fortune.
“When you kind of look at the performance boost that you’re getting on Blackwell versus Hopper, every hyperscaler is going to aggressively buy this stuff up,” he said. “Not to mention enterprise customers and tier-two cloud players.”
Nvidia makes deal with Accenture to boost AI adoption
The generative AI boom, of course, quickly made Nvidia, which has added more than $2 trillion to its market cap in just over a year, one of the world’s largest companies. The stock accounted for roughly 30% of the S&P 500’s gains in the first half of the year, with shares up over 154% year to date.
A dip earlier in the month saw the company shed almost $300 billion in market cap over a single day, the biggest-ever drop for an American company, which Zino attributed largely to a mix of both profit-taking and what he called “AI fatigue.” As tech giants tout the hundreds of billions they’ve recently spent on AI, some have questioned how long it will take for shareholders to see returns on that investment.
There are also worries about whether companies outside of Big Tech are prepared and have the resources to adequately invest in AI adoption, even as they fear being left behind.
“The Fortune 500 is not ready for gen AI, that’s the real issue,” Ted Mortonson, a managing director and tech desk strategist at Baird, recently told Fortune. “So, we’re building infrastructure right now, but if you look at even the Accenture numbers, they basically said that 10% of the Fortune 500 [has] moved to the cloud and [is] gen AI ready.”
Nvidia’s partnership with Accenture, which Huang said had been in the works for four months, bolsters the company’s efforts to make AI tools more accessible to a broader set of clients.
As part of the new deal, Accenture will create what it calls an “Nvidia Business Group,” which will consist of 30,000 employees focused on helping clients scale enterprise AI adoption and use tools like so-called digital agents. Accenture, which has credited $3 billion in new business to clients demanding help deploying gen AI, saw its stock rise 2% Thursday morning.
