Nvidia’s biggest customers – Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta – are on track to spend roughly US$800b on data centres and AI infrastructure this year.
That amount is nearly double last year’s total, with analysts expecting industry-wide spending to top US$1 trillion ($1.6t).
That historic windfall has increasingly drawn Nvidia into bankrolling AI expansion.
The company has faced increased questions about circular financing through funding its own AI developer clients by helping AI start-ups pay for Nvidia-based infrastructure.
The company again projected no revenue from sales of AI computing chips in China in its forecast.
Beijing has only recently begun allowing limited quantities of Nvidia’s H200 processors into the country, with ByteDance and Tencent reportedly each receiving around 10,000 units in recent weeks – a fraction of what United States export licences permit.
Growth in the company’s share price has trailed other chip companies in recent months and pales in comparison to the stratospheric leaps in 2023 that followed the launch of ChatGPT.
That market surge catapulted the California-based company to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, a perch it still holds ahead of iPhone-maker Apple.
– AFP