Soaring Nvidia doubles down on Israel

Nvidia Corporation made history last week, when it added $180 billion to its market capitalization in one day, bringing the total to $1 trillion. This was after it stunned the market with a whopping $11 billion in sales growth guidance (compared to analyst estimates of $7 billion), thanks to a growing demand for microchips adapted to artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, Nvidia joined the exclusive club of companies traded with more than $ 1 trillion in market capitalization, among them Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

In a recent speech at National Taiwan University, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has headed the company since its founding in 1993, couldn’t hide his excitement at its success, and at the future he sees for AI, calling it “a rebirth of the computer industry.” “Just as you were with the computer and chip revolution, you are at the beginning, at the starting line of artificial intelligence. Every industry will be revolutionized,” Huang told the graduating students.

Huang is ranked the 38th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $34 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In it, his personal story has all the elements of the American dream, from a difficult childhood as the introverted child of immigrants to the presidency of one of the most talked-about and perhaps also one of the most ambitious corporations in the world.

Nvidia also has an Israeli angle. In 2020, it completed the acquisition of Mellanox, a local company specializing in the development and production of components designed to accelerate data transfer between servers and data storage systems for cloud computing and data centers. The acquisition price was $7.36 billion.

Last year, Nvidia established an additional development center in Israel to develop CPUs (central processing units) for a range of technology applications, among them artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.

During a visit to Israel in April, Huang toured the company’s main development center in Yokneam. “You at Mellanox are used to market competition; you have always come in to innovate the market,” he told Mellanox employees.

Last week, Nvidia’s connection to Israel marked another step forward when the company announced plans to build a supercomputer for generative AI tasks, called Israel-1, in the country, with an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on June 4, 2023.

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