directly to His Royal Leather Jacketness, AKA Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, after Nvidia's recent Computex keynote. But hold that thought while we cover off some details. That valuation is based on Nvidia's current share price and thus market capitalisation.
It is, of course, all driven by Nvidia's success in AI. Exactly how that plays out in future is hard to say. Will Nvidia continue to dominate? Will the likes of Microsoft and Google succeed in building their own AI chips, reducing their dependence on Nvidia? The notion of running AI on its GPUs is a relatively recent phenomenon. So, don't believe claims that Nvidia saw this all coming. For sure, the company put the time and effort into parallel computing on GPUs that no other company could be bothered with. So, Nvidia deserves this success. But when it started off down a road originally called GPGPU, Nvidia didn't see AI coming.
For sure, those technologies can be pretty magical. But you could also argue they are being used to deprecate the importance of the actual hardware. That's why the pure rasterisation power of many of Nvidia's latest RTX 40 series GPUs were relatively disappointing. Nvidia now relies to a greater and greater degree on those clever AI features to deliver higher frame rates.
But Nvidia's shift in emphasis is clear enough. AMD can compete when it comes to conventional pixel pumping. But Nvidia's huge advantage in AI is something that no company can currently match. So, that's where Nvidia seems to be putting the emphasis with its gaming GPUs. That explains why, if true, Nvidia has very modest plans for its next generation of GPUs in pure hardware terms., some members of the next-gen RTX 50 series will actually see regression in terms of things like shader core counts, while memory availability and bus widths look set to stagnate for yet another generation.