High-powered chips such as Nvidia’s H100 have become essential to building generative AI systems that are capable of creating text and images that closely resemble what humans can produce. Generative AI promises to unleash new kinds of productivity tools but also threatens to shake up jobs in industries such as media and education.
Meta hit the $1 trillion milestone in June 2021, when it was still called Facebook, but dropped below the threshold just a few months later. Amazon became the first public company to lose $1 trillion in market capitalisation in November amid a wider sell-off in tech stocks last year.Shares in Nvidia lost half their value during 2022 as investors fretted about a slowdown in corporate spending in data centres and pandemic hangovers in the gaming and cryptocurrency markets.
Morgan Stanley described Nvidia’s outlook upgrade last week as “the largest dollar revenue upside in industry history”, adding: “We simply have no historical precedent for the magnitude of this step function.”