Against the backdrop of the global AI boom continuing to drive demand for high-end chips and servers, TSMC's latest March revenue report showed that the company's financial performance in the first quarter was strong, with year-on-year growth reaching a new high in more than a year.
Judging from the data, TSMC's revenue in the first quarter reached NT$592.6 billion (about 134 billion yuan), which is not only in the company's own expectations, but also exceeds the average market expectation of NT$579.5 billion (about 131 billion yuan).
Among them, in March, TSMC achieved a revenue of NT$195.211 billion (about RMB 44.156 billion), a year-on-year surge of 34.3%.
According to reports, TSMC will raise its capital expenditure budget for 2024 from the original $28 billion to $32 billion to $30 billion to $34 billion, an adjustment of more than 7%.
But the chip company with the most momentum at present is not TSMC, but someone else. That is Nvidia, which took off on the AI tuyere.
Compared to TSMC, Nvidia can only be regarded as a rising star in the semiconductor field, and its success is mainly due to its continuous innovation in GPU and AI chip technology.
Since its inception in 1993, NVIDIA has focused on the R&D and innovation of graphics processing units (GPUs). These GPUs were initially primarily used for video games, but their uses have since rapidly expanded to include everything from automotive to high-performance computing.
In 2022, with the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI, and the explosive growth of AI technology and applications triggered by it, NVIDIA's market value jumped rapidly.
Especially after entering 2024, almost overnight, the company's market capitalization will break through the $2 trillion mark. A month ago, on March 5, the company, known for its artificial intelligence chips, once again broke its own historical record, surpassing the global oil giant Saudi Aramco in terms of market capitalization, becoming the world's third-largest company by market capitalization and the world's largest chip company.
This marks Nvidia's great success not only in the field of technology, but also in the financial markets with unprecedented recognition. The two giants of the technology industry, Microsoft and Apple, have a market capitalization of $3.04 trillion and $2.61 trillion, respectively.
Since entering 2024, Nvidia's stock price has risen by more than 90%, and compared to 2023, it has risen by as much as 239%. This phenomenal growth rate is largely due to its leadership in the field of artificial intelligence and the market's optimistic expectations about the future potential of AI technology.
NVIDIA's products and technologies are used in a wide range of applications, from self-driving cars to large-scale data processing centers, and rapid growth in these fields is driving the growing demand for high-performance computing solutions.
In late February 2024 alone, Nvidia's market capitalization broke through from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in just eight months.
In contrast, other tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple took two years, six months and about two years to make the leap, respectively. NVIDIA's rapid market capitalization growth not only highlights its importance in the global capital markets, but also reflects investors' recognition of its long-term growth potential.
At least in the short term, Nvidia has no rival in the field of GPU manufacturing. The main reason why Nvidia can stand out like this is that it has a "moat" composed of technical barriers and patents.
At last year's Worldwide Technology Conference (GTC), NVIDIA showcased the breadth and depth of its technology landscape, issuing 37 press releases covering a range of new partnerships, software libraries, and models, demonstrating the strength of its technology ecosystem.
As Nvidia continues to strengthen its market defenses, similar events are expected to become more frequent in the upcoming next GTC to further solidify its leadership position in the industry.
These partnerships are critical to NVIDIA. Today, hundreds of companies and millions of developers use NVIDIA's product development tools and applications.
This widespread adoption of the technology has created a solid market base for NVIDIA, as once developers and enterprises have built their applications on NVIDIA platforms, they are rarely willing to migrate those models and programs to other silicon platforms, at least in the short term.
NVIDIA's strong market position is largely due to the "inertia" of its software ecosystem. The company's investment in software includes writing code, testing, optimization, and training employees on how to use the software.
These initial high investments make enterprise customers more dependent on NVIDIA's solutions once they choose NVIDIA's solutions, and the cost and difficulty of moving to other platforms are relatively high.
As a core part of its software ecosystem, CUDA provides software and libraries that integrate software and libraries in a way that allows it to build an extremely reliable and irreplaceable ecosystem, even if there are alternatives to CUDA.
This combination of technology and go-to-market strategy not only lays the foundation for NVIDIA's current success, but also provides a solid platform for its future growth.