It’s not yet March and I’m already admitting defeat on my prediction that NVIDIA would remain flat in 2024. The company’s stock is up 64% this year, adding $700 billion in market cap since January. Its earnings report this week soundly beat expectations with a 265% revenue increase, sparking a $277 billion stock market pop on Thursday, the largest single-day jump in history. So I’ll say it here, mea culpa.
While NVIDIA’s competition is indeed rising, as I reported in December, competitors like AMD and Intel have struggled to match its software advantage, which is proving to be a key lock-in, one I underestimated last year. NVIDIA’s customers buy its A100 and H100 chips to train and run AI models, but do that work via NVIDIA’s proprietary software.