Nvidia's market capitalization rose a day by Ali plus NetEase, and for the Chinese market it plans to do the same
Image source: Visual China
On February 22, local time, Nvidia Corp. Market capitalization soared to an all-time high, setting a record for the largest single-day market capitalization increase in history, surpassing Meta's historic gain of $197 billion just three weeks ago.
Nvidia's stock price rose 16% in a single day, increasing its market value by about $277 billion, and the single-day market value increase has exceeded the combined market value of Alibaba and NetEase (as of the close of the U.S. stock market on February 22, Alibaba's market value was $193.9 billion, and NetEase's market value was $70.2 billion).
Top 10 single-day market capitalization increases in history. Image source: Bloomberg
As of the close of the U.S. stock market on February 22, Nvidia had a market value of $1.94 trillion, approaching the $2 trillion mark, ranking fourth among the world's listed companies, just one step away from the $2.061 trillion of Saudi Arabian Oil Company, the third largest market capitalization in the world, while the top two Microsoft and Apple are both in the $3 trillion market capitalization.
This time, Nvidia's stock price soared in a single day, driving the U.S. stock market higher. The Nasdaq closed up 2.96% at 16,041.62 on February 22, the Dow Jones rose 1.18% to 39,069.11, and the S&P 500 rose 2.11% to 5,087.03. Among them, the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 both hit new all-time highs.
Nvidia released its results for the fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year 2024 on February 21 local time. Although before the release of the earnings report, many financial institutions warned of position warning signs, triggering a plunge in Nvidia's stock price. But Nvidia's earnings report showed impressive results: Nvidia posted revenue of $22.1 billion in the quarter ended Jan. 28, beating analysts' expectations of $20.41 billion, up 22% quarter-on-quarter and up 265% year-over-year. Net profit in the fourth quarter was $12.3 billion, up 765% year-on-year. Full-year revenue reached an all-time high of $60.9 billion, up 126%. After the earnings report, Nvidia's stock price skyrocketed.
According to the financial report, Nvidia's fourth-quarter revenue mainly came from the data center, that is, the smart chip business, reaching $18.4 billion, an increase of 27% over the third quarter and a year-on-year increase of 409%, and the full-year revenue increased by 217% to a record $47.5 billion. Revenue growth in data centers is driven by NVIDIA GPU chips.
In Nvidia's earnings call, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said that half of data center revenue comes from large cloud service providers such as Microsoft, saying that "the world has reached a new turning point in the era of computing." The trillion-dollar installed base of data center infrastructure is rapidly shifting from general-purpose to accelerated computing...... The company has begun building the next generation of modern data centers, which we call AI factories, dedicated to refining raw data and generating valuable intelligence in the era of generative AI. ”
Regarding the launch of a new generation of AI chips, Colette Kress said that Nvidia is on track to launch the H200 chip in the second quarter as planned, and the demand is strong, and the inference performance of the H200 is almost double that of the H100. According to reports, the performance improvement of H200 is mainly reflected in the inference performance of large models, which can process Llama2 70B large language models nearly twice as fast as H100. H200 also improves energy efficiency, reducing energy consumption by about 50% compared to H100.
For the Chinese market, Colette Kress said that although Nvidia has not yet obtained a license from the U.S. government to ship restricted products to China, Nvidia has begun shipping alternative products to the Chinese market that do not require a license. In the fourth quarter, Nvidia's sales revenue in China fell to a "mid-single-digit percentage" of the company's data center revenue, and Nvidia expects this figure to remain in a similar range in the first quarter.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company would do its best to succeed in the Chinese market "within U.S. restrictions."