Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, through the Nvidia GPU Know-how Convention in San Jose, California, on March 19, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Photographs
5 years in the past, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang owned a stake in his chipmaker price roughly $3 billion. After Thursday’s rally, which pushed the inventory to a file, his holdings now stand at greater than $90 billion.
Nvidia late Wednesday reported first-quarter earnings that topped estimates, with gross sales leaping greater than 200% for a 3rd straight quarter, pushed by demand for synthetic intelligence processors.
Huang additionally delivered a better-than-expected forecast and indicated to traders that the corporate sees insatiable demand for its AI graphics processing models, or GPUs. The corporate signaled its prospects, particularly the massive cloud corporations, might get a powerful return on their funding within the expensive chips.
“We’re essentially altering how computing works and what computer systems can do,” Huang stated.
Huang owns about 86.76 million shares of Nvidia, or greater than 3.5% of the corporate’s excellent shares. With the inventory rising over 9% to shut at a worth of almost $1,038 per share on Thursday, the worth of his stake rose by about $7.7 billion.
Nvidia shares have greater than doubled this 12 months after tripling in 2023. They’re up about 28-fold prior to now 5 years. Huang added shares to his stake in 2022, when the inventory hit relative lows earlier than the AI growth.
Huang, 61, based the Silicon Valley firm in 1993 to construct GPUs for 3D gaming. Whereas gaming was the corporate’s greatest enterprise for many years, Nvidia has dipped into different markets, together with cloud gaming subscriptions, the metaverse and cryptocurrency mining chips.
However Nvidia’s fortunes shifted dramatically in late 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, opening up the idea of generative AI to the broader public. The expertise showcased a future by which computer systems will not simply retrieve new data from databases, however also can generate new content material and solutions to questions from giant caches of unsorted knowledge.
OpenAI does most of its AI growth on Nvidia GPUs. As different corporations akin to Microsoft, Google and Meta bolstered their investments in AI analysis and growth, they wanted billions of {dollars} price of the most recent AI chips to construct out their fashions.
Huang has been the face of Nvidia and its principal salesperson, consistently extolling the potential and energy of utilizing the corporate’s GPUs for constructing AI.
Nvidia, which has been growing AI software program and instruments for greater than a decade, ended up in prime place to turn out to be the highest provider to the largest expertise corporations. The corporate now has about 80% of the marketplace for AI chips, and Huang is among the many 20 richest individuals on the planet.
