Nvidia, a maker of gaming chips for video consoles and PCs that are expected to play a crucial role in the development of new artificial intelligence (AI) projects, is on the verge of a market capitalization of 1 billion dollars, a figure close to 80% of the Spanish gross domestic product (GDP). About to cross the threshold of the Olympus of the great American technologies, ahead of Meta and treading on Amazon’s heels. Still far from Google and especially from Microsoft’s 2.5 billion.
Nvidia had revenue of about $26 billion last year and has soared after announcing that it expected dramatic revenue growth in the current financial year. Despite the bright expectations, this market capitalization multiplies 30 times the turnover and 60 times the profits that the company projects for its current fiscal year, which ends next year.
According to experts, this company, which is run by Jensen Huang, is one of the best placed to be one of the absolute winners of the “fourth industrial revolution” that those involved in AI are constantly announcing. And in fact it is one of the few with the ability to offer what the leading companies in that field are now asking for. The company says it hopes to be the first supplier of advanced chips for AI. Although there are also unknowns, as its chips are manufactured in Taiwan and it is one of the companies that could be greatly affected by the trade and technology blockade of the Joe Biden Administration in China.
Huang talks about his company’s situation as the “iPhone moment”, referring to the mobile phone revolution and the explosive growth of the market that triggered the product created by Apple. But valuations like these leave short the crazy quotes that achieved most of the dotcoms at the end of the last century and that ended, as is already known, with a resounding crash into the ground in record time. In addition, below the radar of companies like this, there are legions of software startups, apps, which register crazy valuations without having the support of any concrete results. Capital seeks them with passion.
This is not to question the importance and dangers, the ambivalent consequences, technological, social and economic, of the latest developments in AI. But global interconnectedness – markets open 24 hours, platforms, social networks, media – triggers and spreads the expectations and infinite greed of investors and users on a scale unknown in financial history. Bubbles have gone from singular events that happened once every many years, there were times when there was only one every century, to frequent episodes that are part of everyday life. As the employee of the month.
They had barely emerged from the end of the cryptocurrency mirage and were already terrorizing UK pension funds. Months later it was the turn of the US bank, which is trying to figure out what the next campaign will be. And since the world is desperately searching for a new source of rapid and exponential enrichment, it won’t take long for the next one to emerge.
The AI ​​has all the numbers to be the big protagonist. And there is a character who plays a special role in the spread of the new dogma that keeps the planet’s speculators in awe. This is Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, the company that created Chat GPT, a character who already stood out in the development of the finished cryptocurrencies. In fact, he is part of the constellation of mega-rich nurtured under the umbrella of the technological revolution focused on Silicon Valley, such as Elon Musk, to give a well-known example. With them he founded OpenAI. In the digital newsletter Artificial by Delia RodrÃguez in La Vanguardia, you can read a revealing profile of the character.
For some time now, analysts have considered it obvious that, to reach maturity, their AI project needed more money, a lot more. Like the investment of “billions of millions” that will be made by Bill Gates’ company, Microsoft, recently announced. This is in addition to about 1,000 more contributed initially.
The next step was that of politics. Preceded by a wave of unparalleled admiration, Altman has intervened in the US Congress and traveled halfway around the world to meet with heads of government, including several Europeans – the Spanish Pedro Sánchez, the French Emmanuel Macron, or the European Internal Market Commissioner, Thierry Breton, among others. A good hint about the ambitions of an entrepreneur who aspires to eat the world, in the literal sense. Its initial release is being on this scale. An unprecedented global marketing campaign that has the political elite as special guests.
The audience was probably so softened by the apocalyptic warnings about the danger of the new tool he has created that he managed to make no one doubt his good intentions. A candidness that can take its toll.
Altman has called for a global regulator for the new universe of AI and strict control over new proposals from companies in this new world. He demands that the EU think long and hard before proposing rules of the game that he does not like. Without a doubt, he wants to anticipate the action of governments and probably thinks of being the one who defines the rules. It is the clearest indication that the dimension in which he plans to operate is global and he does not want fragmented jurisdictions. It is the so-called market unit but on the scale of the new globalization. However, technological and moral considerations aside, this is a business. And it is already at the center of the next financial storm.
