Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) stock soared 82.5% in the first quarter of 2024. (The market’s quarter ended on Thursday, as U.S. financial markets were closed on Friday for the Good Friday holiday.) That performance made the artificial intelligence (AI) chip leader the second-best performer on the S&P 500 index, behind only Super Micro Computer, a server specialist that’s also benefiting from strong demand for AI products and services.
For context, in the first quarter, the S&P 500 gained 10.2%, and notched an all-time closing high on Thursday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index gained 9.1%.
Nvidia stock’s top catalyst: AI, particularly generative AI
The main catalyst behind Nvidia stock’s amazing performance so far in 2024 can be stated in two words: artificial intelligence. More specifically, it’s generative AI, which has significantly expanded the potential applications of AI. This tech enables users to quickly generate new content of various types based on a variety of input categories, such as images and sounds.
Generative AI captivated the tech world in November 2022 when OpenAI broadly released ChatGPT. This chatbot’s popularity skyrocketed, leading to a frenzy among companies and other entities to obtain generative AI capabilities.
Nvidia’s data center: Its primary platform beneficiary of robust demand for AI capabilities
Nvidia’s data center platform is its primary beneficiary of the strong demand among entities of all types to acquire generative AI capabilities. The data center is Nvidia’s largest platform, accounting for 83% of its total revenue in its quarter ended Jan. 28. This business has been growing like gangbusters, as will be quantified below.
Nvidia’s data center graphics processing units (GPUs) accelerate the processing of AI and high-performance computing workloads. The company’s current flagship data center GPU is the H100, and its next Hopper architecture-based GPU, H200, is scheduled to begin shipping in the second quarter of this year. Its data center GPUs based on its next-generation architecture, Blackwell, promise a huge leap in…
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