- Nvidia is dominating earnings season, but it hasn't even released its results yet.
- Other large tech giants have also mentioned in their earnings conferences that they are ramping up investment in AI infrastructure.
- Nvidia offers the popular H100 GPU chip used by many companies and in some cases specifically name-checked.
Nvidia is dominating Q1 earnings season, but it hasn't even released its results yet.
The company has some direct and indirect buy-in from mega-tech companies, which it counts as some of its biggest customers.
Words like “AI infrastructure,” “generative AI,” and “infrastructure capex” pop up all the time in earnings calls from Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms, all of which are part of the incredibly popular H100. It shows that more money is being poured into Nvidia for the sake of it. GPU chip.
Nvidia's H100 GPU costs more than $40,000 and enables AI technologies that power ChatGPT, Anthropic, and other generative AI platforms.
The company is gearing up to release its next-generation AI chip, dubbed Blackwell, later this year.
Elon Musk shouts out Nvidia's AI chips
Perhaps the biggest vote of confidence in Nvidia this earnings season came from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He said on the company's earnings call that the electric car maker will more than double its H100 GPU chips by the end of the year.
“We've installed 35,000 H100 computers, or GPUs, and they're up and running. So they're actually running,” Musk said last month. “There are approximately 35,000 H100s in active service, and by the end of this year we will probably have around 85,000.”
Musk said the H100 is helping Tesla further improve its fully self-driving software.
Mega-cap Tech’s AI Spending Soars
Meta Platforms announced that it has raised its 2024 capital expenditure forecast from the previous range of $30 billion to $37 billion to a range of $35 billion to $40 billion. According to Meta, this increase is primarily driven by increased “infrastructure investment to support the AI roadmap.”
In January, Meta announced it would buy 350,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia in 2024, but an update from Yann LeCun, the company's head of AI, says the company has bought even more H100 chips in recent months. It has been suggested that.
Speaking at the Forging the Future of Business with AI Summit last month, LeCun and moderator John Werner said that Meta has purchased an additional 500,000 GPUs from Nvidia, for a total of 1 million units, with a retail price of He said it was about $30 billion.
Microsoft has similar ambitions, according to internal documents, saying it wants to amass a war chest of 1.8 million GPUs by the end of 2024.
Alphabet said capital spending in the first quarter was $12 billion, about double the same period last year, with “by far the largest investments in technology infrastructure, with the largest components for servers, followed by data centers.” It is said that it was.
Microsoft expects capital spending to be $50 billion next fiscal year, and said third-quarter spending rose about 80% to $14 billion.
Amazon did not provide details on its capital spending plans, but said it expected to spend more money.
“We expect overall capital spending to increase significantly year-over-year in 2024, primarily to support AWS growth, including generative AI,” said Amazon CFO Brian Olsabsky. This is due to an increase in infrastructure investment.”
Total capital spending by Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon is expected to reach $205 billion this year, up 40% from 2023 levels, according to UBS. And a significant portion of that money is likely to be funneled to Nvidia for his H100 and Blackwell AI chips.
Nvidia has competition, but it still has an edge
Nvidia's rival AMD's recent financial results suggest that much of this business will go to Nvidia rather than its competitors.
AMD said its MI300 AI chips will generate about $4 billion in revenue in 2024, which pales in comparison to the more than $100 billion in revenue Nvidia expects this year.
Meanwhile, Intel recently announced Gaudi 3, an AI chip that competes with Nvidia, but said it expects sales of the chip to be only $500 million this year.
Investors will have to wait until after the market closes on May 22 to actually see Nvidia's financial results.