Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks during an event in Taipei, Taiwan, Sunday, June 2, 2024.
Annabelle Chih Bloomberg Getty Images
Nvidia Stocks headed for a record close on Friday as Wall Street gear up for future earnings and updates from all of the chipmaker’s top customers on planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The stock was up 2.6% to $138.31 as of 1 p.m. The last high was $135.58 on June 18. The stock is now up nearly 180% for the year and is up more than ninefold since the start of 2023.
Nvidia, widely regarded as the company selling picks and shovels to the AI gold rush, has benefited the most from the generative AI boom, which began with the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022. Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPU) is used to create and deploys advanced AI models that power ChatGPT and similar applications.
Companies included Microsoft, Meta, Googleand Amazon buy Nvidia GPUs in bulk to build a growing cluster of computers for more advanced AI work. The companies are all scheduled to report quarterly results at the end of October.
Of the billions of dollars top tech companies spend each year building AI, a large amount will go to Nvidia, which controls about 95% of the market for AI training and inference chips, according to analysts at Mizuho.
Nvidia’s revenue has doubled in each of the past five quarters, and at least tripled during that time. Growth is expected to slow for the rest of the year, with analysts projecting an 82% expansion to $32.9 billion in the quarter ending in October, according to LSEG.
Nvidia recently said that demand for next-generation AI GPUs that Blackwell called “isn’t crazy” and expects billions of dollars in revenue from new products in the fourth quarter.
With a market capitalization of $3.4 trillion, Nvidia is the second most valuable US company, after Apple about $3.53 trillion.
WATCH: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Squawk Box
