Nvidia still the AI star
Plus: Australia's new cyber czar on ransoms; ANZ's Suncorp appeal; The BRICS unwieldy expansion
This week was the heaviest of Australia's annual reporting season. But arguably the most important story for local investors had nothing to do with mining, banking or domestic oligopolies on the ASX.
Nvidia, the US artificial intelligence chipmaker posted a quarterly result for the ages (or more accurately "guidance for the ages", as one analyst put it) this week, leaving Wall Street gobsmacked. The company reported 88% growth in quarterly revenue — that's on a sequential basis, not even annual. It also forecast USD16 billion ($25 billion) in revenue for the current quarter, implying growth of 170% from a year earlier.
They are pretty incredible numbers whichever way you cut them. Our technology correspondent Dan Van Boom this morning wrote about Nvidia's results and how it has emerged as the chief beneficiary of the ChatGPT driven AI boom, ahead of Microsoft (the biggest investor in ChatGPT maker Open AI) and Alphabet, which through its search engine Google has launched its own AI service Bard.
Dan's piece contained a quote from veteran Sydney fund manager, Alex Pollak of Loftus Peak, that neatly summarises current sentiment towards Nvidia: "In 30 years of looking at company releases and forecasts, I don't think I've ever seen the magnitude of an upgrade this large."
