NVIDIA has become the world’s largest chipmaker by market cap, beating TSMC, Intel, and Samsung. The company’s market cap increased from US$579.15 billion to US$617.92 billion on the 26th of October. In comparison, TSMC’s cap was US$592.14 billion. Intel and Samsung have a market cap of “just” US$201 billion and US$400 billion, respectively.
NVIDIA started off as a designer of graphics processing units, but slowly expanded into neural network accelerators, CPUs, data centers, and other AI chips. The chipmaker is at the cutting edge of both graphics and AI chips, miles ahead of competitors AMD, Intel, Google, and Amazon. The AI accelerator market is slated to grow to a whopping $34.3 billion by 2023 (presently at $18.1 billion), and the bulk of it will likely be controller by Team Green.
Lately, AMD and Intel have been pushing into this sector with their Instinct MI200 and Ponte Vecchio processors, but both these SKUs are yet to be released. At the moment, NVIDIA’s A100 Tensor core accelerator leads the pack.
Although a customer of TSMC (like AMD), NVIDIA has been splitting its chip supply between the Taiwanese foundry and Samsung. This flexibility allowed it to weather the semiconductor shortages with more resilience than its competitors.
NVIDIA’s recent advancements include the GeForce NOW Game Streaming (Cloud) service which is now available across most of the world. In addition to that, the metaverse Omniverse has also been gaining traction. It’s a virtual space where artists can create 3D images, videos, and pretty much anything you can imagine.
The latest push from the Santa Clara-based chipmaker came in the form of the $30+ billion acquisition of Arm. Although the takeover has several hurdles to clear, NVIDIA remains confident that it’ll conclude within the set timeline. Arm’s ISA is pretty much everywhere from smartphones to PCs, vehicles, home appliances, etc. If the company manages to successfully acquire Arm, it’ll be a significant boost to both stocks as well as the TAM.
