One of the largest manufacturers of graphics processing units (GPU), Nvidia, reported a 265% increase in revenue due to the rising global demand for artificial intelligence equipment. According to the most recently announced fourth-quarter financial results, Nvidia achieved a revenue of $22.1 billion in the fourth quarter, marking a 22% increase from the third quarter and a 265% increase from the previous year.
Significant Interest in Nvidia Shares
Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang attributed the sales increase to the surge in global demand for accelerated computing and generative artificial intelligence. The GPU manufacturer currently has a market value of $1.67 trillion.
The results emerged as Nvidia surpassed Elon Musk’s Tesla as Wall Street’s most traded stock. According to a Reuters report, about $30 billion worth of Nvidia shares changed hands among investors in the last 30 trading sessions, while for Tesla, the figure was an average of $22 billion during the same time frame.
Musk confirmed on January 27th that Tesla plans to spend more than $500 million in just the year 2024 to source artificial intelligence hardware from Nvidia. Musk stated the following on the matter:
“At this point, the cost of being competitive in artificial intelligence is at least a few billion dollars a year.”
Tesla also plans to purchase AI-related hardware from Nvidia’s biggest GPU manufacturer rival, AMD. Developments in the field of artificial intelligence continue to attract the interest of cryptocurrency market investors, triggering a rise in artificial intelligence projects.
The Artificial Intelligence Battle Begins
First introduced in September 2018, the Nvidia RTX series is seen as a go-to platform for generative artificial intelligence enthusiasts, gamers, and creators. In the third quarter of 2023, Nvidia achieved a revenue of $18.1 billion, supported by a strong market value of $1.2 trillion.
In December 2023, Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) at Meta, acknowledged Nvidia’s current dominance in the AI hardware industry. He also stated that the chip manufacturer has started the artificial intelligence battle:
“I know Jensen. There’s an artificial intelligence battle, and he’s supplying the weapons.”
On the other hand, LeCun criticized the widespread use of text-based models for training generative artificial intelligence systems and added the following:
“Text is a very weak source of information. Train a system with the equivalent of 20,000 years of reading material, and it still won’t understand that if A equals B, then B equals A.”