Jensen Huang, the co-founder, president and CEO of Santa Clara-based Nvidia Corporation, just had an absurdly good day.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a press conference at the MGM during CES in Las Vegas on Jan. 7, 2018. The Silicon Valley executive saw his net worth increase by $6.4 billion Thursday, as Nvidia’s stock value jumped 25%.
The Silicon Valley executive saw his net worth increase by $6.4 billion Thursday, as the stock value of his chipmaking giant leaped almost 25% from the market’s previous close. Nvidia, which makes the graphics processing chips critical to artificial intelligence systems, forecast a record sales total for the current quarter in its earnings report Wednesday afternoon.
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When the stock market closed at 4 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Nvidia was worth $755 billion, more than double its value at the start of the year and already the world’s sixth biggest publicly traded company. But then the firm announced it had beaten Wall Street’s estimates for last quarter’s revenue and profit, and it forecast $11 billion in sales for May through July. The stock price leaped and then held fairly steady throughout Thursday, closing to give the firm a $939.3 billion valuation.
The one-day value increase is one of the biggest for a company in American history, falling just shy of nearly $191 billion one-day jumps by Apple and Amazon in 2022. Earlier this May, Bank of America analysts wrote that AI is in a “baby bubble.”
No individual stood more to gain from the day’s AI-fueled gold rush than Huang, who along with his wife, according to a May filing, owns 3.5% of the company he helped found in 1993. That stake, when the market closed on Thursday, was worth almost $33 billion — enough to place Huang among the 40 richest people in the world even without his other assets.
Nvidia has long dominated the market for PC gaming but started orienting its chips toward data sets and machine learning a decade ago when Huang realized artificial intelligence would create a huge market for computer processing, he told CNBC.
Now he and his firm are cashing in on a boom that began with ChatGPT’s viral release in November 2022 and has continued with massive funding rounds for AI startups and huge investments in the technology from established firms like Google, Microsoft and Meta.
Nvidia’s popular AI chip — the A100 — sells for $10,000 a pop. The State of AI report has estimated that tens of thousands are in use across major companies such as Meta and Tesla. Computing titans like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have also used A100s to provide customers with processing power, even as they work to build their own in-house alternatives.
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