Nvidia hasnow become the third member of the most exclusive of clubs – companies whose stock market value has topped $US3 trillion (that’s $4.5 trillion Australian dollars) – and pressed ahead of Apple to be just whisker shy of the top spot,currently occupied by Microsoft.
Even James Packer has become a latter-day Nvidia disciple – having doubled down on his investment in recent months.
But despite its size and meteoric rise in the market,Nvidia is hardly a household name. Most of us still don’t even know how to pronounce it. For those who want to sound informed at dinner parties,“in vidia” is its phonetic spelling – and it’s derived from the Latin word for “envy”. How appropriate.
With Nvidia’s chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang getting mobbed by tech groupies at public events,what is the company’s secret superpower?
This company makesbest-in-class computer chips – a vital ingredient for data processing. The recent boom in its earnings and value comes off the back of the excitement around the next iteration of artificial intelligence,generative AI,which requires an exponential lift in processing power.
If,as they say in business parlance,chipmakers are the picks and shovels of the AI explosion,then Nvidia is an earthmover.