Nvidia Corporation made history last week, when it added $180 billion to its market cap in one day, bringing the total to $1 trillion. This was after it stunned the market with phenomenal sales growth guidance of $11 billion (which compares with analysts’ estimates of $7 billion), thanks to the growing demand for microchips adapted to artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia thus joined the exclusive club of companies traded at over $1 trillion market cap, among the them Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent company Alphabet.
In a speech that he gave recently at National Taiwan University, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has headed the company since it was founded in 1993, could barely conceal his excitement at its success, and at the future he sees for AI, calling it "a rebirth of the computer industry." "Just as I was with the PC and chip revolution, you’re at the beginning, at the starting line of AI. Every industry will be revolutionized," Huang told graduating students.
Huang is ranked the world’s 38th richest person world, with wealth amounting to $34 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His personal story has in it all the elements of the American Dream, from a difficult childhood as the introverted child of immigrants to heading one of the most talked about, and perhaps also one of the most ambitious, companies in the world.
Nvidia also has an Israeli angle. In 2020, it completed the acquisition of Mellanox, a local company specializing in the development and production of components designed to speed up data transfer between servers and data storage systems for cloud computing and data centers. The acquisition price was $7.36 billion.
Last year, Nvidia set up an additional development center in Israel for development of CPUs (central processing units) for a range of technological applications, among them AI, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.
During a visit to Israel in April, Huang toured the company’s main development center in Yokne’am. "You at Mellanox are used to competing in the market; I always come to invent the market," he told Mellanox employees.
Last week, Nvidia’s Israel connection marked another step up when the company announced plans to build a supercomputer for generative AI tasks, called Israel-1, in the country, at an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 4, 2023.
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