Tech
Nvidia Set to Become First U.S. Chipmaker to Reach $1 Trillion Market Cap
(CTN News) – As of Tuesday, Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) was on track to hit $1 trillion in market capitalization for the first time, making it the first U.S. chipmaker to reach that milestone.
Shares of the company were up 3.5% at $402.91 in premarket trading.
As of its last close, Meta, valued at $670 billion, clinched the trillion-dollar market capitalization milestone in 2021, along with Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O).
AI took center stage after Nvidia shocked investors with a revenue forecast that surprised analysts by more than 50% last week.
Wall Street analysts called Nvidia’s forecast “unfathomable” and “cosmological,” hiking their price targets. A price target of $1.6 trillion puts the company on par with Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Shares of Nvidia rose about 25% last week, sparking a rally in AI-related stocks and pushing the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (.SOX) to its highest level in a year.
OpenAI-owned ChatGPT’s success has prompted Alphabet and Microsoft to make the most of generative AI, which can talk like a human and write poetry.
ORIGINAL STORY: Nvidia Reports Strong Q1 2024 Earnings, Beats Estimates with $11 Billion Sales Forecast
Shares of Nvidia jumped 26% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the company disclosed first-quarter earnings for its fiscal 2024.
How the company fared compared to the Refinitiv consensus estimate for the quarter ending in April is detailed below.
- EPS: $1.09, adjusted, versus 92 cents expected
- Revenue: $7.19 billion, versus $6.52 billion expected
Nvidia Expects Sales of $11 Billion in Current Quarter, Surpassing Wall Street Estimates
Nvidia forecasted sales of around $11 billion for the current quarter, plus or less 2%, more than 50% more than the $7.15 billion predicted by Wall Street.
The stock of Nvidia had already risen 109% in 2023 before the after-hours gyration, with investors largely encouraged by the company’s dominant position in the market for AI technology.
CEO Jensen Huang of Nvidia recently stated that the business was experiencing “surging demand” for its products targeted at data centers.
The data center division of Nvidia reported $4.28 billion in revenue, above analyst projections of $3.9 billion by 14%. According to Nvidia, cloud providers and major consumer internet firms use Nvidia GPUs for training and deploying generative AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Nvidia’s success in the data center demonstrates the growing importance of artificial intelligence chips for cloud providers and other businesses with a large server infrastructure.
Nvidia’s gaming sector, which includes sales of graphics cards for PCs, saw a 38% reduction in revenue to $2.24 billion, compared to estimates of $1.98 billion. The slowdown in the global economy and the increased production of Nvidia’s newest graphics processing units for video games were cited as the fall.
Nvidia’s automotive branch, which includes processors and software to develop self-driving cars, had annual growth of 114%, but with quarterly revenues of less than $300 million, it is still a relatively minor part of the company.
The company’s quarterly net income increased to $2.04 billion, or 82 cents per share, from $1.62 billion, or 64 cents per share, in the same time a year ago. Sales for Nvidia were down 13% from last year’s record high of $8.29 billion.
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