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Shares of Nvidia have risen roughly 14% in the past month.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Nvidia
is doubling down on artificial-intelligence technology that CEO Jensen Huang predicts will revolutionize every industry.
In the keynote speech for the annual Nvidia (ticker: NVDA) GTC conference—the acronym once stood for GPU Technology Conference, a reference to the company’s roots in graphics processing chips—Huang focused specifically on expanding the company’s portfolio of AI-focused chips and software applications.
In kicking off a highly anticipated virtual meeting with analysts following his speech, Huang said Nvidia is targeting industries with $100 trillion in revenue, adding that he considers 1% of that total—$1 trillion—to be the company’s total addressable market.
In a slide during the presentation, the company broke down the $1 trillion opportunity this way. It sees $300 billion in revenue from the automotive industry, another $300 billion in chips and systems, $150 billion each from AI enterprise software and “Omniverse” enterprise simulation software, and $100 billion from videogaming.
The company did not provide any update to financial guidance during the presentation to analysts. CFO Colette Kress did say that Nvidia has repurchased $2 billion of stock in the current quarter, and noted that the company has $5.2 billion remaining on its current stock buyback authorization.
In his keynote, Huang unveiled Nvidia’s new “Hopper” chip family, named for the computer-science pioneer Grace Hopper, which succeeds the Ampere AI chip architecture the company announced two years ago. The company introduced the H100, a processor with 80 billion transistors, which it calls the “world’s most advanced chip.”
Huang said the chip will be “the engine of the world’s AI infrastructure.” Hopper provides a ninefold improvement in performance over the Ampere architecture, the CEO said. The company also said that its Grace CPU “superchip” for datacenter applications is on track to be shipped in the second half of 2023.
The company also announced a suite of new and updated AI software tools for speech recognition and translation, recommendation engines, and improved real-time communication including language translation, among other applications.
Nvidia unveiled a computer system for creating “digital twins” of physical worlds called Omniverse, with applications in robotics and industrial automation. The notion of digital twins is to provide digital representations of real-world objects to do testing and development.
Omniverse also provides a new set of tools for the creation of virtual worlds and avatars. The company is launching an Omniverse cloud service to allow designers to access Omniverse for design and simulation applications.
Huang also announced updates to the company’s automated and electric-vehicle platforms, including new agreements with the EV manufacturers BYD (BYDDF) and
Lucid
(LCID) to use the Nvidia Drive platform on next-generation vehicles. the company also said its pipeline of automotive design wins now stands at $11 billion anticipated over the next six year, up from $8 billion a year ago.
Nvidia shares were down 0.5% Tuesday afternoon and trading at $265.92 a pop. The stock has risen almost 25% over the last week, but is off roughly 10% so far this year.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com
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