Open AI, Microsoft, Google, Meta: These are the companies that have been at the forefront of discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in recent months. Open AI caused a bang in the technology industry with its ChatGPT language model and fueled an arms race for AI systems. Microsoft has deepened its alliance with Open AI, while Google and Meta are driving their own AI initiatives with heightened urgency.
But many other companies also want to take advantage of the current enthusiasm for the area, including outfitters whose products are used more in the background. The prime example is Nvidia.
The American semiconductor group makes computer chips that are well suited for complex AI applications, and it has impressively underlined in the past few days that this is a bright business at the moment. He has given a sales forecast that far exceeded expectations and stunned Wall Street.
One analyst commented, “What can we say other than just WOW.” On Tuesday, Nvidia hit a milestone in the stock market, surpassing $1 trillion in market cap for the first time. No semiconductor specialist has ever managed that before.
Nvidia thus entered a select circle, only four other American companies – Apple, Microsoft, Google’s parent holding company Alphabet and Amazon – are valued at more than one trillion dollars. On Wednesday, Nvidia’s market capitalization was again slightly below the trillion mark.
The big AI boost for Nvidia’s business comes quite suddenly. The company’s sales fell in the past quarter, but a jump of 64 percent to $11.0 billion is now predicted for the next three months, while analysts had only expected an average of $7.2 billion.
CEO Jensen Huang rejoiced at the “incredible orders” his company is currently getting, especially from cloud computing specialists and internet companies. He highlighted Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta as examples of customers. Jensen called the launch of ChatGPT and the ensuing hype about AI an “iPhone moment,” a nod to Apple’s once groundbreaking smartphone.
Nvidia’s euphoric outlook drew the financial markets’ attention to other companies that could be the beneficiaries. For example TSMC , the Taiwan-based giant in the custom manufacturing of chips, which supplies Nvidia, among others, or the European chip supplier ASML.
The share price of the American Nvidia competitor AMD also benefited, having almost doubled since the beginning of the year. Like Nvidia, AMD also builds special processors that can process multiple tasks simultaneously rather than one after the other, which makes them particularly powerful and allows the largest possible data sets to be processed in the shortest possible time. AMD also uses TSMC for production.
Conversely, companies that are not currently seen at the forefront of AI development are now losing ground. Intel has fared much worse than Nvidia and AMD in the stock market this year. Until a few years ago, Intel was the highest valued American semiconductor company, today Nvidia has a market capitalization that is almost eight times higher.
Another company that has been using AI for some time is creative software provider Adobe. He developed his own technology called Sensei AI. It was first integrated into his analysis tools for evaluating data traffic on the Internet and then also into the core products such as Photoshop, Lightroom or Illustrator.
Last fall, the company shifted into even higher gears, with Product Board Member Scott Belsky writing in his blog about the next wave of AI-based products – including the associated digital security and verification tools that allow manipulated images, videos or even films to be viewed with just a few mouse clicks track down. Six months later, this wave spills onto the markets.
In March, Adobe made the first trial versions of Firefly available to selected test users – a so-called generative AI that can be used to generate detailed images and graphics from words and explanations via the in-house stock photo platform. Adobe is not alone in this. The social media service Tiktok offers its users a video effect that also generates images based on text input.
The programs Dall-E and Dall-E 2 developed by Open AI as well as Midjourney from the American software lab of the same name or Stable Diffusion from the Munich University research group CompVis can teach computers to see and turn words into pictures. This requires special AI systems. They are technically constructed in such a way that they are imitated, at least in their basic features, of a brain. While just a few years ago huge supercomputers were needed to use these digital tools, an open source system like that of Stable Diffusion runs on any properly equipped PC or smartphone.
The AI wave is currently fueling a gold rush mood in the start-up scene. According to the analysis service Crunchbase, investors invested 7.1 billion dollars in young companies that are related to AI in one way or another in the past three months.
The data service provider Statista estimates that more than 200 billion dollars will be generated globally with AI products this year – by the end of the decade it could be more than 1800 billion dollars. The current leading companies all come from the USA and China. Europe and Japan have so far been considered important research centers.
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