Graphics Processing Units

Exclusive | Trump Officials Torpedoed Nvidia’s Push to Export AI Chips to China

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Shortly before President Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea, an urgent issue emerged. Trump wanted to discuss a request by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang to allow sales of a new generation of artificial-intelligence chips to China, current and former administration officials said.

Greenlighting the export of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips would be a seismic policy shift potentially giving China, the U.S.’s biggest geopolitical competitor, a technological accelerant. Huang—who speaks to Trump often—has lobbied relentlessly to maintain access to the Chinese market.

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Lingling Wei

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November 3, 2025

As Nvidia prepares to post results, these three Europe chip names are tipped for gains, JPMorgan says

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As Nvidia prepares to publish its much-anticipated full-year results this Wednesday, analysts at JPMorgan say VAT Group, ASML Holding, and ASM International all offer the strongest prospects for investors seeking to cash in on an upturn in the market for microchips.

JPMorgan analysts led by Sandeep Deshpande explained that while the slump in the microchip market is now showing signs of improvement, certain segments of the market — including those that supply chips to the auto and industrial sectors — are improving more slowly than others.

The market for memory chips is, meanwhile, giving off signals of a bumper recovery, with inventory levels for the microchips used in computer storage devices currently sitting at lower than average seasonal levels, they said in a note to clients that published Monday.

As such, those Europe-based semiconductor companies least exposed to the autos and industrial sectors, which have the highest exposure to the market for memory chips, are set to see the biggest benefits in the near term, said Deshpande and the team.

Swiss company VAT Group
VACN,
+0.37%
makes vacuum valves used in chip manufacturing, while Dutch firms ASML Holding
ASML,
-0.10%

ASML,
-1.73%
and ASM International
ASM,
-2.13%
both make the lithography machines used to manufacture semiconductors.

Shares in all three European companies are up significantly over the previous 12 months — VAT has gained 51%, ASML 43% and ASM 81%.

Notably, all three European companies are all focused on making the equipment used to manufacture the advanced microchips used in electronic products, including smartphones and personal computers. In JPMorgan’s view, this puts them in an advantageous position to benefit from any recovery.

At the same time, those companies most exposed to the auto and tech industries, including German firm Infineon Technologies AG
IFX,
-0.96%
and Swiss firm STMicroelectronics
STM,
-0.29%,
are set to continue trading at subdued levels — despite already being cheap — as the market remains challenging, they caution.

Deshpande and the team noted that inventory levels for the chips used in the auto and industrial sectors currently sit at rates 38.7% higher than three-year seasonal averages in the fourth-quarter of 2023, marking a deterioration on the 31.1% rate in the third quarter of 2023.

In contrast, inventory levels for memory chips improved significantly in the final three months of 2023, having fallen from rates 19% above seasonal averages in the third quarter to rates 1.7% below normal seasonal levels at the end of the fourth quarter of last year.

For reference, ASML Holding, which was previously split off from ASM International in 1984 through a joint venture with Philips
PHIA,
-0.32%,
is currently the world’s sole manufacturer of the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to make the advanced chips used in the AI industry.

ASM International continues to design the wafer processing machines used to make microchips. VAT Group produces vacuum valves that are needed to manufacture high tech chips in sterile environments to ensure they are not exposed to outside particles.

Nvidia
NVDA,
-0.06%,
the world’s largest chip designer, will on Wednesday announce quarterly results, which investors are expected to pore over, seeking vital clues on the health of the global chip market amid much excitement around a possible AI driven boom.

Read: Nvidia’s earnings report could kill the momentum driving U.S. stocks higher, regardless of how it turns out.

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February 19, 2024

Amazon’s stock just racked up its highest close in more than two years

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Amazon.com Inc. shares continued their charge higher Friday, securing their highest close in more than two years.

The e-commerce giant’s stock advanced 2.7% in Friday’s session to finish the day at $174.45. That was the best ending level since Dec. 9, 2021, when Amazon’s stock
AMZN,
+2.71%
closed at $147.17, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Don’t miss: Is Meta now a value stock?

Amazon briefly surpassed Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
+2.04%

GOOGL,
+2.12%
as the third most valuable U.S. company by market capitalization last week, though it’s since fallen back to the No. 4 spot. Still, the recent momentum for Amazon shares has been enough to help the company hold down a place in the top four even as Nvidia Corp.
NVDA,
+3.58%
nips at its heels.

Alphabet finished Friday’s session with a $1.86 trillion market cap, while Amazon’s was $1.81 trillion and Nvidia’s was $1.78 trillion.

Wall Street had a mixed reaction to earnings from big technology companies this quarter, but Amazon’s results were among those that were well received.

“Overall the overhangs which kept a lid on AMZN shares — e-commerce deceleration in 2021, e-commerce deceleration and margin compression in 2022 and AWS deceleration in 2023 — will have dissipated throughout 2024,” UBS analyst Stephen Ju wrote in a note to clients following those results.

The company has been a huge driver of earnings growth for the S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector, as its quarterly earnings per share grew to $1 in the latest quarter from 3 cents a year before. The consumer discretionary sector is now expected to post 33% growth in EPS for the fourth quarter, according to FactSet, but without Amazon, that would swing to a decline of about 1%.

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February 9, 2024

So Long, Apple and Tesla. We Built a Better Magnificent 7.

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By Nicholas Jasinski

Jan 12, 2024, 1:00 am EST

In this article

AMZN

AAPL

MSFT

NVDA

SPX

The Magnificent Seven had an extraordinary year in 2023—one that will be very difficult to repeat. And there will be a new Magnificent Seven in 2024.

Continue reading this article with a Barron’s subscription.

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January 11, 2024

If Nvidia looked more like Salesforce, it might unlock billions more in cash

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Nvidia Corp. is raking in billions in cash, but one analyst thinks the chip maker could throw $100 billion more onto the pile if it started to look more like Salesforce Inc.

Nvidia
NVDA,
+2.29%
might unlock even more cash by developing businesses that expand recurring revenue, according to BofA Securities analyst Vivek Arya. The company has suffered some boom-and-bust cycles in recent years, and another bust could be smoothed by developing longer-term software contracts akin to those of Salesforce
CRM,
-0.05%.
, Workday Inc.
WDAY,
-0.48%
and ServiceNow Inc.
NOW,
+0.64%,
which generate recurring revenue from their customers.

Arya sees a pathway for Nvidia to rake in $100 billion in incremental free cash flow over the next two years if it can bulk up its own recurring-revenue options.

Read: Apple’s stock needs to get ‘unstuck’ — and its innovation rut may not be helping

“While NVDA has a solid lead in AI, hardware-oriented businesses are not valued as highly as visibility tends to be limited,” Arya wrote. Nvidia generates only about $1 billion, or 2%, of its sales from software and subscriptions. Arya doesn’t think the company can get much higher than $5 billion with its software and subscription offerings unless it turns to acquisitions.

Nvidia has shown some openness to deals that would beef up its intellectual property and software offerings, Arya notes, as it tried to buy British chip designer Arm Holdings
ARM,
-1.96%
before facing regulatory pushback.

“We envision [Nvidia] considering more enhanced partnerships/M&A of software companies that are helping traditional enterprise customers deploy, monitor and analyze [generative AI] apps,” he wrote. Nvidia “is already serving them via on-premise hardware and/or its DGX cloud service, but we believe greater direct recurring software/service channel could be more impactful.”

The addition of more recurring-revenue streams could help Nvidia’s “relatively depressed trading multiple,” in Arya’s view. Nvidia shares trade at a 20% to 30% discount to its “Magnificent Seven” peers on the basis of price to earnings as well as enterprise value to free cash flow, even though the company’s compound annual growth rate on the top line is three times what it is for those other tech giants.

The discount is “partly due to uncertainty in [calendar 2025] growth prospects, and partly due to a very hardware-dependent business unlike other large-cap software/internet peers that have recurring-revenue profiles,” he wrote.

Arya has a buy rating and $700 price objective on the stock.

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January 5, 2024

These 20 stocks soared the most in 2023

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(Updated with Friday’s closing prices.)

The 2023 rally for stocks in the U.S. accelerated as more investors bought the idea that the Federal Reserve succeeded in its effort to bring inflation to heel.

The S&P 500
SPX
ended Friday with a 24.2% gain for 2023, following a 19.4% decline in 2022. (All price changes in this article exclude dividends). Among the 500 stocks, 65% were up for 2023. Below is a list of the year’s 20 best performers in the benchmark index.

This article focuses on large-cap stocks. MarketWatch Editor in Chief Mark DeCambre took a broader look at all U.S. stocks of companies with market capitalizations of at least $1 billion, to list 10 with gains ranging from 412% to 1,924%.

The Fed began raising short-term interest rates and pushing long-term rates higher in March 2022 by allowing its bond portfolio to run off. That explains the poor performance for stocks in 2022, as bonds and even bank accounts because more attractive to investors.

The central bank hasn’t raised the federal-funds rate since moving it to the current target range of 5.25% to 5.50% in July, and its economic projections point to three rate cuts in 2024.

Investors are anticipating the return to a low-rate environment by scooping up 10-year U.S. Treasury notes
BX:TMUBMUSD10Y,
whose yield ended the year at 3.88%, down from 4.84% on Oct. 27 — the day of the S&P 500’s low for the second half of 2023.

Read: Treasury yields end mostly higher but little changed on year after wild 2023

Before looking at the list of best-performing stocks of 2023, here’s a summary of how the 11 sectors of the S&P 500 performed, with the full index and three more broad indexes at the bottom:

Sector or index	2023 price change	2022 price change	Price change since end of 2021	Forward P/E	Forward P/E at end of 2022	Forward P/E at end of 2023
Information Technology	56.4%	-28.9%	11.5%	26.7	20.0	28.2
Communication Services	54.4%	-40.4%	-7.6%	17.4	14.3	21.0
Consumer Discretionary	41.0%	-37.6%	-11.4%	26.2	21.7	34.7
Industrials	16.0%	-7.1%	8.0%	20.0	18.7	22.0
Materials	10.2%	-14.1%	-4.9%	19.5	15.8	16.6
Financials	9.9%	-12.4%	-3.4%	14.6	13.0	16.3
Real Estate	8.3%	-28.4%	-21.6%	18.3	16.9	24.7
Healthcare	0.3%	-3.6%	-3.3%	18.2	17.7	17.3
Consumer Staples	-2.2%	-3.2%	-5.4%	19.3	20.6	21.4
Energy	-4.8%	59.0%	51.8%	10.9	9.8	11.1
Utilities	-10.2%	-1.4%	-11.4%	15.9	18.7	20.4

S&P 500 SPX	24.2%	-19.4%	0.4%	19.7	16.8	21.6
Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA	13.7%	-8.8%	3.8%	17.6	16.6	18.9
Nasdaq Composite COMP	43.4%	-33.1%	-3.5%	26.9	22.6	32.0
Nasdaq-100 NDX	53.8%	-33.0%	3.5%	26.3	20.9	30.3
Source: FactSet

A look at 2023 price action really needs to encompass what took place in 2022 for context. The broad indexes haven’t moved much from their levels at the end of 2022 (again, excluding dividends). We have included current forward price-to-earnings ratios along with those at the end of 2021 and 2022. These valuations have declined a bit, which may provide some comfort for investors wondering how likely it is for stocks to continue to rally in 2024.

Biggest price increases among the S&P 500

Here are the 20 stocks in the S&P 500 whose prices rose the most in 2023:

Company	Ticker	2023 price change	2022 price change	Price change since end of 2021	Forward P/E	Forward P/E at end of 2022	Forward P/E at end of 2021
Nvidia Corp.	NVDA,	239%	-50%	68%	24.9	34.4	58.0
Meta Platforms Inc. Class A	META, -1.22%	194%	-64%	5%	20.2	14.7	23.5
Royal Caribbean Group	RCL, -0.37%	162%	-36%	68%	14.3	14.9	232.4
Builders FirstSource Inc.	BLDR, -1.02%	157%	-24%	95%	14.2	10.7	13.3
Uber Technologies Inc.	UBER, -2.49%	149%	-41%	47%	56.9	N/A	N/A
Carnival Corp.	CCL, -0.70%	130%	-60%	-8%	18.7	41.3	N/A
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.	AMD, -0.91%	128%	-55%	2%	39.7	17.7	43.1
PulteGroup Inc.	PHM, -0.26%	127%	-20%	81%	9.1	6.3	6.2
Palo Alto Networks Inc.	PANW, -0.24%	111%	-25%	59%	50.2	38.0	70.1
Tesla Inc.	TSLA, -1.86%	102%	-65%	-29%	66.2	22.3	120.3
Broadcom Inc.	AVGO, -0.55%	100%	-16%	68%	23.2	13.6	19.8
Salesforce Inc.	CRM, -0.92%	98%	-48%	4%	28.0	23.8	53.5
Fair Isaac Corp.	FICO, -0.46%	94%	38%	168%	47.1	29.3	28.7
Arista Networks Inc.	ANET, -0.62%	94%	-16%	64%	32.7	22.3	41.4
Intel Corp.	INTC, -0.28%	90%	-49%	-2%	26.6	14.6	13.9
Jabil Inc.	JBL, -0.45%	87%	-3%	81%	13.5	7.9	10.3
Lam Research Corp.	LRCX, -0.81%	86%	-42%	9%	25.2	13.5	20.2
ServiceNow Inc.	NOW, +0.57%	82%	-40%	9%	56.0	42.6	90.1
Amazon.com Inc.	AMZN, -0.94%	81%	-50%	-9%	42.0	46.7	64.9
Monolithic Power Systems Inc.	MPWR, -0.23%	78%	-28%	28%	49.1	27.3	57.9
Source: FactSet

Click on the tickers for more about each company.

Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information available for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

Don’t miss: Nvidia tops list of Wall Street’s 20 favorite stocks for 2024

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December 30, 2023

Broadcom now ranks among 10 largest U.S. companies after big 2023 stock gains

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Nvidia Corp. has catapulted up the list of the most valuable U.S. companies this year, rising eight spots from the end of last year to sit in the fifth position with a market capitalization of $1.2 trillion.

But other chip companies have seen their positions rise even more. Just look at Broadcom Inc.
AVGO,
+2.10%,
which has climbed 16 spots over the course of 2023 and on Friday cracked the top 10 for the first time, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Broadcom eclipsed Visa Inc.
V,
-0.27%
at Friday’s close to take the No. 10 spot, with a valuation of $527.7 billion.

Read: Could Nvidia’s stock — up 231% this year — actually be a bargain?

Admittedly, Broadcom had some help along the way. The company acquired VMware in late November, and its market capitalization gained about $50 billion at the close of the transaction, according to FactSet data.

But Broadcom’s ascent also reflects how chip stocks have gotten more shine this year amid the artificial-intelligence frenzy. Broadcom’s stock has doubled so far in 2023.

Mizuho desk-based analyst Jordan Klein expects “an order acceleration in networking silicon for AI clusters” in the second half of 2024, as calendar year 2025 could bring a big year of capital-expenditure investments in AI for ethernet back-end high-speed connections.

Broadcom “is the KEY WINNER in that investment cycle as the arms dealer to all networking OEMs,” or original equipment manufacturers, wrote Klein, who’s associated with Mizuho’s sales team and not its research arm.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
AMD,
+0.83%
has also seen a nice march up the charts, rising 48 spots so far in 2023 to rank 30th in terms of market cap. AMD was valued at $223.9 billion as of Friday’s close.

“We view AMD as well-positioned to gain incremental share of the hugely profitable $100 billion-plus accelerator market while continuing to make progress in server [central processing units] against incumbent [Intel],” BofA Securities analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a recent upgrade.

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December 15, 2023

AMD Stock Is More Expensive Than Nvidia. That Makes No Sense.

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Advanced Micro Devices is on a roll this week, with its shares marching higher since the chip maker revealed ambitious plans to push into artificial intelligence. Investors looking to dive in best be warned: the stock now looks more expensive than Nvidia.

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December 8, 2023

Nvidia stock under pressure after report of AI chip delay for China

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Shares of Nvidia Corp. fell in premarket trading on Friday, following a report that the tech giant will delay the launch of one of its new artificial intelligence chips destined for China.

Nvidia will now roll out one of three big AI chips for that market early next year Reuters reported, citing sources. Earlier this month, a report surfaced that Nvidia planned the trio of AI chips for China after the U.S. government blocked it from selling high-end chips in that country.

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November 24, 2023

Walmart, Nvidia, Novo Nordisk, Vista Outdoor, GM, and More Stock Market Movers

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Stock futures pointed higher Friday as Wall Street returned for a shortened trading session following the Thanksgiving holiday. Retailers will be in focus on Black Friday, which marks the unofficial start to the Christmas shopping season.

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November 24, 2023

Nvidia ends an earnings recession and is helping to reshape corporate profits

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With yet another blowout earnings report, Nvidia Corp. has ended an earnings recession in the U.S. and helped to solidify the continuation of a drastic change to corporate profits.

Nvidia NVDA on Tuesday rode enduring demand for hardware that is essential for artificial-intelligence tasks to yet another record quarter, as revenue tripled and profit zoomed more than 1,300% higher year over year. Nvidia recorded earnings of more than $9 billion in just three months, a total it had never achieved in a full year before 2022.

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November 21, 2023

S&P 500 futures stall near four-month highs as traders eye Nvidia earnings

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U.S. stock futures on Tuesday showed the November rally stalling ahead of results from AI chipmaker Nvidia.

How are stock-index futures trading

On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA rose 204 points, or 0.58%, to 35151, the S&P 500 SPX increased 33 points, or 0.74%, to 4547, and the Nasdaq Composite COMP gained 159 points, or 1.13%, to 14285.

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November 21, 2023

New Starfield Patch Finally Adds Those Graphics Options You Wanted

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Screenshot: Bethesda

After some beta testing, Bethesda has released Starfield’s latest patch for PC and Xbox. This new update adds DLSS support, the ability to eat food you find in the world instantly, some much-needed graphical options, and plenty of bug fixes, too.

The Top 10 Most-Played Games On Steam Deck: October 2023 Edition

Starfield’s 1.8.86 update is now live on Xbox Series X/S and PC. This update was first beta-tested via Steam earlier this month. It appears those tests went well, as Bethesda has now pushed the new update live for everyone. This means that after months of paid mods and community drama, Starfield finally has official DLSS support, letting folks with compatible Nvidia graphics cards use DLSS Super Resolution, Deep Learning Anti-aliasing (DLAA), Nvidia Reflex Low Latency, and DLSS Frame generation. But that’s not all that’s been added in this update.

The new 1.8.86 update also adds the ability to eat food and drink items that you find in the world without having to pick them up first and chow down on them via the inventory screen. It’s a small change, but it should help keep you immersed in the world and spend less time digging through menus. Plus, it will be fun to just run around places and eat every Chunk I see like an out-of-control cartoon character.

This patch also adds brightness and contrast sliders to the massive open-world space RPG. There are some HDR brightness settings, too for platforms that support that. And yes, it’s still wild that in 2023 a big-budget AAA video game from a veteran game studio shipped without brightness and contrast sliders. What a world!

Anyway, here are the full 1.8.86 patch notes for Starfield:

PERFORMANCE AND STABILITY

Addressed a number of memory-related issues and leaks.
Added some GPU performance optimizations, which will be more impactful on higher-end cards.
Improved renderer threading model, improving CPU usage most notably on higher-end systems.
Various stability and performance improvements.

GAMEPLAY

Added the ability to eat the food placed in the world.
Adjusted stealth to be a bit more forgiving.
Fixed an issue where Andreja’s head would stay permanently cloaked.
Fixed an issue that could prevent players from firing their weapons.
Fixed issues where some NPC could be seen not wearing clothes (Note: This issue may resolve itself over time).
Fixed an issue where already in-progress skill challenges could stop progressing after reaching “the Unity” and starting a new game.
Fixed an issue that could temporarily prevent opening the inventory or saving after entering “the Unity”.
PC: Fixed an issue where mouse movement could be choppy.
Fixed a rare issue that could cause the home ship to be lost.
Fixed an issue where the ship services technician might be missing.
Fixed an issue where occasionally the camera could shake incorrectly during Traveling, Grav Jumping, Docking, or Landing transitions.

GRAPHICS

Addressed an issue with how ambient occlusion appeared in ultrawide resolutions.
Optimized initial shader compilation that occurs on start-up.
Added the ability to adjust Brightness and Contrast in the Display Settings menu.
Added the ability to adjust HDR Brightness provided that the system supports it. (Xbox & Windows 11 only).
Addressed a number of materials that could sometimes present an unintended pattern under certain conditions.
Fixed various visual issues related to the new FOV slider options.
Improved the appearance of the eyes on crowd characters.
Addressed a number of minor visual issues related to lighting, shadows, terrain, and vegetation.
PC: Addressed additional visual issues related to DLSS.

QUESTS

All That Money Can Buy: Fixed a rare issue where players couldn’t sit during the negotiation with Musgrove.
Blast Zone: Fixed an issue where the hard rocks that need to be cleared out by players will not appear on Ngodup Tate’s land.
Echoes of the Past: Fixed an issue where the Grylloba Queen could sometimes not be reachable during the objective “Secure the Shuttle Bay”.
Eye of the Storm: Fixed an issue where players’ quest progression could potentially be blocked due to a missing docking prompt.
Grunt Work: Addressed an issue where progress could appear blocked if “Supra et Ultra” was completed while returning to the Lodge during “High Price to Pay”.
No Sudden Moves: Fixed an issue that could prevent the entrance door to the Scow ship from being opened again.
Operation Starseed: Fixed an issue where the key that is needed to exit the facility could sometimes not be present.
Sabotage: Fixed an issue where David Barron could potentially not be found by players.
Short-Sighted: Fixed an issue where players could rarely become control-locked while speaking with Vladimir.
The Heart of Mars: Fixed an issue where players might not be able to mine the “The Heart of Mars”.

.

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Zack Zwiezen

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November 20, 2023

Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia—What Tech Stocks Hedge Funds Are Buying and Selling

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It’s filing season for a string of major hedge funds, and big tech names like Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia were among the most-traded equities in the third quarter.

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November 15, 2023

Soros snaps up tech stocks in Q3, but dumps some of the biggest names

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Soros Fund Management, the investment firm founded by billionaire George Soros, took new positions or bulked up on IPOs and a number of tech names during the third quarter.

But it sold off small holdings of some of the largest — like Nvidia Corp. and Microsoft Corp. — as well as electric-vehicle maker Rivian Automotive.

According to a filing on Tuesday, the firm during the third quarter bought up 325,000 shares of chip designer Arm Holdings
ARM,
+3.37%,
which went public in September, for $17.4 million. It also bought smaller stakes in recent IPOs such as Maplebear Inc.
CART,
+1.25%,
better known as grocery-delivery platform Instacart, and digital-marketing firm Klaviyo Inc.
KVYO,
+6.90%.
Those purchases were disclosed as investors remain cautious on new IPOs.

Elsewhere, the fund took a new position, of around 41,000 shares, in Apple Inc.
AAPL,
+1.43%.
And it did so as well for Datadog Inc.
DDOG,
+4.58%,
buying 62,000 shares during the quarter. It also bought up 574,962 shares of Splunk, and took fresh positions in Snowflake Inc.
SNOW,
+4.51%
and Taiwan Semiconductor
TSM,
+2.58%.

Soros also packed on more to some of its other tech holdings. It added 125,000 shares to its stake in Uber Technologies Inc.
UBER,
+3.14%,
boosting its position by 16.6% for a total of 878,955 shares. It also bought 42,000 more shares of another gig-economy player, DoorDash Inc.
DASH,
+4.37%,
a 30.9% increase for 178,075 shares.

While Soros boosted its stake in General Motors
GM,
+4.83%,
it sold off its 4.2 million shares in Rivian
RIVN,
+4.39%.
The firm also sold off its positions — of roughly 10,000 shares apiece — in tech giants Microsoft
MSFT,
+0.98%
and Nvidia
NVDA,
+2.13%.

Soros Fund Management also sold off its stake in Walt Disney Co.
DIS,
+1.82%.

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November 14, 2023

‘Nobody in their right mind would do it.’ Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he wouldn’t start a company if he had a do-over.

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“ ‘You have to get yourself to believe that it’s not that hard, because it’s way harder than you think. If I go taking all of my knowledge now and I go back, and I said, I’m going to endure that whole journey again, I think it’s too much. It is just too much.’ ”

— Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

That was one of the world’s most visionary tech-sector leaders, Nvidia
NVDA,
-1.86%
CEO Jensen Huang, who explained that building Nvidia was “a million times harder than I expected it to be” as he theorized that “nobody in their right mind would do it” if they were aware of the true personal toll.

The Taiwan-born 60-year-old, whose family relocated to Thailand and then the U.S. in his youth and is said to have co-founded Nvidia in 1993 following a meeting at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, Calif., after stints at AMD
AMD,
-0.49%
and LSI Logic, wouldn’t start his own company today, he said, if he were 30 years old.

The tech titan, however, posited in a recent interview with the podcast Acquired that a “superpower” among entrepreneurs is the ability to trick themselves into believing “it’s not that hard.”

Huang said that his biggest fear remains, as it has been since Nvidia’s early days, is failing to facilitate success among workers. “I’m afraid of the same things today that I was in the very beginning of this company, which is letting the employees down.”

Huang, who according to FactSet owns a 3.5% stake in Nvidia (market cap: $1.04 trillion), explained in the podcast interview that workers joining a company end up believing in its vision and taking on its aspirations as their own.

“You have a lot of people who joined your company because they believe in your hopes and dreams, and they’ve adopted it as their hopes and dreams,” Huang said. “You want to be right for them. You want to be successful for them. You want them to be able to build a great life. … The greatest fear is that you let them down.”

In explaining how he persevered, despite doubts and challenges, in building Nvidia into the company it is today, Huang credited a “support network” of people who never gave up on him during the three-decade journey.

He explained that the experience of leading Nvidia during those periods when its share price has been in seeming free fall was almost “too much to endure,” after the company was first listed on public markets in 1999. “It’s embarrassing no matter how you think about it.”

His comments come as Nvidia’s share price has, again, been in retreat, losing ground following a major 245% surge over the previous 12 months.

More recently, the Santa Clara–based company’s stock was hit by the Biden administration’s decision to introduce tougher controls on the export of semiconductors to China.

Read: One semiconductor company is expected to grow sales nearly as quickly as Nvidia through 2025

Looking ahead, Huang said developments in artificial intelligence now pose an “enormous” opportunity for companies like Nvidia. “The market opportunity has grown by probably a thousand times,” he said.

He said AI will “create more jobs” in the near term, but he also warned that the creation of those jobs doesn’t mean certain other jobs will not be lost to automation. “If you become more productive and the company becomes more profitable, usually they hire more people to expand into new areas,” Huang said.

“Now, obviously, net generation of jobs doesn’t guarantee that any one human doesn’t get fired. That’s obviously true. It’s more likely that someone will lose a job to someone else, some other human that uses an AI,” he added.

He advised people to “learn how to use AI” as he argued that “jobs will change.”

As to Nvidia itself, Huang explained, the company — in a reflection of the products it sells — is structured like a “computing stack.”

He said “Nvidia’s not built like a military” with a top-down command and control system. Instead, Huang said, the company is organized like a “neural network” with a decentralized structure, reflecting a belief that “your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product.”

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October 20, 2023

Israeli exec who hired Palestinians in tech boom still hopes for peace while mourning slain daughter

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When Eyal Waldman thinks of his youngest daughter and her boyfriend, he sees them dancing.

“Danielle and Noam loved dancing, and I hope they continue dancing somewhere up there,” Eyal Waldman told MarketWatch.

Danielle Waldman and Noam Shay were killed at a music festival in southern Israel last week, part of a campaign by the Hamas terrorist group that has led to further bloodshed.

Danielle’s father — an Israeli tech executive who co-founded Mellanox, which became the largest acquisition in Nvidia Corp.’s
NVDA,
-3.16%
history — spoke with MarketWatch as Friday turned to Saturday in Israel, in hopes of increasing attention on the hostages who are still held in Gaza as well as to memorialize his daughter, who was 24, and Shay, who was 26.

“They loved to celebrate life,” Eyal Waldman said of his daughter and her boyfriend, before adding “they went down on Friday night to celebrate life, love and freedom, and they were massacred.”

Courtesy of Eyal Waldman

Danielle Waldman — who was born in Palo Alto, California, but moved back to Israel with her family at age 4 — and Israeli native Shay were students who met six years ago in the army, and her father said they had been inseparable since. They attended the Supernova music festival in early October with friends, and were killed while attempting to escape Hamas terrorists in a car that Eyal Waldman found bullet-riddled near the festival’s location.

“Danielle and Noam have done nothing bad to anyone, and they were murdered only because they were Israelis,” he said.

Eyal Waldman, a onetime Israeli combat fighter, founded Mellanox in 1999, and sold it 20 years later to Nvidia for $6.9 billion. He is known internationally for attempting to foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians through his work in technology — Mellanox hired Palestinian tech workers in Gaza, Nablus and the West Bank town of Rawabi, which led to a “60 Minutes” appearance.

“We wanted to make peace, to work together, to bring prosperity to the Palestinian people, the same as we have in Israel,” he said. “I brought even Apple
AAPL,
-1.03%
to open a design center in Rawabi and I brought other companies to open design centers in Rawabi.”

The death of his daughter and Shay and the scope of the attacks and counter-attacks dominating headlines in recent days have not changed Waldman’s hope for peace in the future, he said, but not the near future. He believes this time, the violence “took us back several years, if not decades.”

“We need time to build the trust, if at all, between the two nations and start working together to be able to talk about peace,” he said. “Until then, we will continue protecting ourselves in a very direct manner in Gaza and everywhere else around Israel.”

Waldman also said he would continue to try to hire Palestinians and work with them to be a part of the Israeli tech ecosystem, as long as they state “that they are working for peace, and they are not supporting — not financially and not in any other way — any terror actions, or any actions that are not civilian economics between the two nations.”

“Our hands are always reaching out for peace. But at the same time, before we do this, we need people to understand that Israel is strong, Israel is united, and we will never let anyone harm the citizens of the state of Israel again.”

Read: Israel-Gaza war scenarios: Here’s what might lift oil prices to $95, $100 and $115 a barrel

Waldman was thankful for U.S. aid and was forceful in discussing the need to find hostages that were still missing. One of Nvidia’s current employees was kidnapped, according to an email that Chief Executive Jensen Huang sent to employees that was obtained by Insider, which reported that the employee was also at the Supernova music festival.

Nvidia has more than 3,000 employees in Israel mostly working for Mellanox, which makes networking gear that connects Nvidia’s high-performance data-center products. In an emailed statement, an Nvidia spokesman said “our focus now is working with our Israel leadership to ensure our employees and their families are safe and well cared for. We will then turn our focus to shoring up [the company’s] execution if necessary to ensure continued operations of our business.”

Waldman said the return of hostages is top of mind.

“What’s important now is to focus on bringing back the hostages, and that is the No. 1 priority for the State of Israel and for the international community,” he said.

Continuing to worry about others while suffering his own tragedy is a trait that Eyal Waldman seems to have passed down to his youngest daughter. He said that he had received a note from another festival attendee who was wounded in the eye in the initial attack. That victim told him that Danielle Waldman had stopped to attend to her and make sure she was safe before attempting to escape in a car that was later believed to have been attacked by Hamas terrorists with rifles.

“They loved to celebrate life,” Waldman said of his daughter and her boyfriend.

“And they went down on Friday night to celebrate life, love and freedom, and they were massacred.”

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October 13, 2023

Tesla, Rivian, Discover, Sphere Entertainment, Nvidia, and More Stock Market Movers

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https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-movers-e5dab615

Updated Oct. 2, 2023 12:18 pm ET / Original Oct. 2, 2023 4:43 am ET

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October 2, 2023

Nvidia identified as target of French antitrust raid: WSJ

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Nvidia Corp.’s offices in France were the subject of a dawn raid Wednesday by French antitrust regulators, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, which cited sources close to the raid.

Nvidia
NVDA,
+1.46%
is widely recognized by Wall Street as the biggest chipmaker that stands to gain from the current AI frenzy, as data centers that run the AI models need more and more hardware and software to sustain workloads. Shares of the $1.065 trillion company are up 195% year to date.

On Wednesday, the Autorité de la Concurrence, France’s national competition regulator, said it had carried out the raid at “the premises of a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics-cards sector,” and refused to comment on “the entity or on the practices in question.”

Nvidia declined to comment to both the Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch.

Nvidia’s stock closed up 1.5% at $430.89 in Thursday trading following the report, while the S&P 500 index
SPX,
+0.59%
gained 0.6%.

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September 28, 2023

Are we bored yet? Retail investors slowing their roll on AI stocks, according to this chart

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There are more signs that investors are cooling a bit on the hot artificial intelligence play, though no one appears ready to let go of their Nvidia stock just yet.

That’s according to Vanda Research analysts, who shared a chart of their latest weekly data showing how retail investor’s net purchases of AI-themed stocks is “steadily waning”:

Marco Iachini, senior vice president, Giacomo Pierantoni, head of data and Lucas Mantle, data scientist at Vanda, said they’ve also noticed fewer news stories covering the sector as well, in their Vandatrack weekly comment that published Thursday.

The fervor for AI-related stocks and technology took off earlier this year, with a pinnacle moment in May when Nvidia
NVDA,
-2.89%
made big predictions on a boom for demand for its AI-related chips. Shares of the company are still up 211% so far this year, but enthusiasm for many tech stocks faded in August as China and interest rate-hike worries cropped up and some companies stressed AI benefits might not happen right away.

That said, Vanda analysts don’t expect Nvidia will feel the hurt of any such waning interest. They point out that short interest in the chip maker has seen a “considerable decline,” in line with its soaring stock price.

“This phenomenon suggests that bearish institutional investors, including long/short hedge funds, may have been compelled to cover their short positions,” said Iachini and his team. “As a result they are unlikely to want to sell the stock in the near term barring strong conviction to do so.”

“It is crucial to recognize that a slowdown in retail demand, by itself, is improbable to trigger substantial price movements, without active bearish participation from institutional investors,” they added.

However, the story is different for smaller AI-related companies such as smaller-cap C3.ai
AI,
-2.78%
as seen in their chart:

For C3.ai, they see a selling trend persisting in coming weeks. The AI software group’s shares are up 154% so far this year, but down 9% this month, taking a hit recently from solid quarterly results that came with forecasts for a bigger-than-expected full year loss. Analysts aren’t quite giving up — among 10 covering the company tracked by FactSet most have hold or a similar rating.

“We believe C3.ai is taking the proper steps to capitalize on Generative AI, but it will take time to prove out,” said a team of analysts at Oppenheimer led by Timothy Horan, after those results were released on Sept. 7. They rate the company perform.

Vanda analysts said another exception to an AI buying slowdown has been IonQ
IONQ,
-6.21%,
“a relatively small quantum computing company that has been outperforming its AI-related counterparts.” They noted “remarkably resilient” demand for the stock, as short interest also increases rapidly.

“This juxtaposition raises a cautionary flag, as a potential weakening of retail interest, coupled with speculative institutional investors accumulating short positions, could create a demand-supply imbalance, potentially triggering a selloff,” they said. Shares of IONQ have soared 422% year-to-date. The company lifted its lifted full-year bookings guidance last month as it reported blowout second-quarter sales.

Young Money blogger Jack Raines highlighted the slowing interest in AI in a post on Thursday , citing data from analytics firm Similarweb that showed ChatGPT traffic down 3.2% in August, after 10% declines in June and July.

“While ChatGPT will probably experience a resurgence this fall as students return to the classroom and expedite their homework via chatbot, it seems like talks of AI disrupting/replacing anything and everything have cooled down,” he said, adding that the “initial euphoria was a bit much.”

Deutsche Bank strategists hopped on the topic in a note to clients entitled “Even hype needs a summer break,” on Thursday, noting how AI interest waned as investors went to the beach and the media turned its attention to extreme weather and “silly season” stories.

“Under the surface, though, there have been important developments indicating a slow maturing of the cycle, of the underlying technologies and of attitudes to a revolution in waiting,” said a team led by analyst Adrian Cox.

Those include Ai being the “elephant in the earnings room,” this summer that also brought a steady stream of AI-related tech announcements. Another theme “Your job is safe..for now,” came via fresh evidence that AI might boost rather than replace white-collar jobs, while yet another saw U.S. politicians also got involved.

This week saw Tesla CEO Elon Musk telling Capital Hill politicians that a new federal agency to oversee AI development is a must.

Another big theme that erupted this summer was the chatter by contrarian commentators questioning the hype around generative AI. Cox alluded to the Similarweb report that got everyone excited as it showed Chat GPT traffic falling to 1.4 billion visitors in August from 1.8 billion in May.

“The bigger picture is that open.ai had zero visitors before the launch of ChatGPT less than a year ago and is now No. 28 in the world, according to Similarweb,” said the Deutsche Bank team.

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September 15, 2023

Tag: Graphics Processing Units

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“They loved to celebrate life,” Eyal Waldman said of his daughter and her boyfriend, before adding “they went down on Friday night to celebrate life, love and freedom, and they were massacred.”

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