Nvidia stock climbs as CFO says new chip to ship in 2024

Nvidia's (NVDA.O) stock climbed on Tuesday after the heavyweight chipmaker said its new flagship AI processor is expected to ship later this year and CEO Jensen Huang said he is chasing a data center market potentially greater than $250 billion.

Nvidia's stock rose nearly 2 per cent to $901 after Huang and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress answered questions from investors at the company's annual developer conference in San Jose, California. The shares had dipped nearly 4 per cent earlier in the day.

"We think we're going to come to market later this year," Kress said, referring to the company's new AI chip, which the company debuted on Monday. Huang estimated that companies operating data centers will spend more than $250 billion a year to upgrade them with accelerated computing components that Nvidia specializes in developing. He said that market was growing by as much as 25 per cent a year.
Nvidia is shifting from selling single chips to selling total systems, potentially winning a larger chunk of spending within data centers.

"Nvidia doesn't build chips, it builds data centers," Huang said. Called Blackwell, Nvidia's new processor combines two squares of silicon the size of the company's previous offering. Nvidia also detailed a new set of software tools to help developers sell artificial-intelligence models more easily to firms that use its technology.

Nvidia is working with contract chip manufacturer TSMC (2330.TW) to avoid bottlenecks in packaging chips that slowed shipments of its previous flagship AI processor, Huang said.

"The volume ramp in demand happened fairly sharply last time, but this time, we've had plenty of visibility" into demand for Blackwell chips, Huang said. Some analysts said Wall Street has already factored in the debut of the B200 Blackwell chip, which the company claims is 30 times faster at some tasks than its predecessor.