Nvidia rides its second wave
The US company that made the chip used to mine bitcoin now produces the graphics processors that AI needs
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a boon for many tech firms. OpenAI and its ChatGPT generative AI software secured $10bn in investment from Microsoft, valuing the start-up at $27bn. And US chipmaker Nvidia in May became only the ninth company to hit a $1-trillion valuation. (Apple got there first, but so too have Facebook/Meta, Amazon and Alphabet/Google.) Back then Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI was having its “iPhone moment”.
Remarkably, the chipmaker is riding its second wave. It was the de facto winner of the bitcoin mining era, but when ethereum, the other major cryptocurrency, changed its model from mining (essentially solving a complex mathematical problem), Nvidia lost a major source of revenue. Then, luckily for it, on November 30 2022, ChatGPT was launched, and everybody needed the processors to power AI...
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