The three mid-ranking Silicon Valley engineers behind Nvidia had just $US40,000 between them when they started the company three decades ago, fuelled by a belief that
Shares, already at a record high, rose by 6.5 per cent as markets opened on Thursday and to some, the only question is how high can it can go.Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive and principal founder, always had big ambitions. It also rode a brief flurry of excitement around the “metaverse”, the virtual reality championed by Mark Zuckerberg.Large language models such as ChatGPT and Google Bard require thousands of GPUs, both for their initial “training” and for the subsequent interactions known as inferences.Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which operate the giant cloud computing data centres on which AI models generally run, are placing orders worth billions of dollars with Nvidia.
The company’s results on Wednesday were seen as definitive because they suggested its leap in sales was not just a one-off but part of a sustained surge in investment.