“AI foundry” Nvidia moves beyond chip design

Dubbed “AI Woodstock” by one analyst, Nvidia unveiled a wide range of fresh plans and new products at the company’s annual GTC conference held Monday in a massive sports arena in San Jose. As its GPUs have become the ubiquitous engines that power the generative AI revolution, the spectacularly successful company introduced new hardware (see inset below) but also made it abundantly clear that it’s not just chips it wants to sell.

As profitable as the sale of chips has been – on the wings of tripled sales, Nvidia’s market value rose 2 trillion dollars recently – the real money is further downstream. A February survey by the American Census Bureau showed 12 percent of US firms of all sizes use some form of AI or plan to do so within the next six months. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated that for every dollar spent on an Nvidia GPU, there could be 10-12 dollars in additional spending across related software, IT services and infrastructure tech.