Rob Meesen — © Topchange
The California gold rush with hundreds of thousands of fortune seekers started after gold was found there in 1848. Entrepreneurs who sold pickaxes to the fortune seekers became filthy rich. In 2024, it will be generative AI that will cause a digital gold rush in California. This time Nvidia is the goldcrest that makes an insane amount of money selling scarce tools.
Deep breath
During our joint theater tour The Sound of Change, I asked René Shuman how much time was involved in composing a new song. “Five minutes,” was his short answer. “And the thirty years that preceded that,” the versatile artist added. There is no such thing as sudden success. Long-term patience is crucial. Nvidia was co-founded in 1993 by Jen-Hsun (Jensen) Huang who remains its CEO. The company is based in Santa Clara in Silicon Valley. The company started producing video cards (GPUs) for games and consoles. My children’s first Xbox had one of those Nvidia graphics processing units. GPUs can perform many calculations simultaneously and that computing power also turned out to be very relevant for mining cryptocurrency, cloud computing and training language models. Nvidia had found the gold vein. Revenue rose by a whopping 265 percent in Q4 2023, to $22.1 billion. The record profit was $12.3 billion.
Strategic acquisition
In 2022, after a ten-year strategic partnership, Nvidia acquired the Dutch software maker Bright Computing, which developed essential software for high-performance computing clusters. That was a brilliant strategic acquisition. Nvidia supplies the fastest hardware and the most widely used operating system for training AI language models. Major technology companies such as Microsoft, Meta and IBM use Nvidia GPUs in their data centers. They are therefore dependent on the Nvidia ecosystem, which doubled its market value to $2,200 billion. The company is now worth more than Alphabet and Amazon. In comparison, ASML has a modest market capitalization of 353 billion euros. According to the Reuters news agency, a consortium of Google, Samsung, Intel and Qualcomm has started a counter-offensive. They want to design an alternative operating system that will make it easier for developers to switch.
The Way It’s Meant to Be Played
Nvidia now employs 30,000 employees in 36 countries. The company has a winning culture that it promotes with the slogan The way It’s Meant to Be Played. The flat organizational structure and ability to learn faster than the competition has already resulted in more than 7,500 patents. On March 18, Jensen Huang presented the new Blackwell B200 AI superchip during the GTC Conference in San Jose. With 208 trillion transistors, it is five times more powerful and energy efficient than its predecessors, such as the Hopper H100. The gold rush continues and Nvidia is the only one providing the pickaxes.
