Chipmaker Nvidia on Tuesday announced a host of initiatives designed to broaden its reach in artificial intelligence and take advantage of what the company calls AI's "iPhone moment." Nvidia stock rose on the news.
Nvidia's reach in artificial intelligence technology already spans graphics processing units, high-performance computing systems, software and cloud computing services. And Nvidia stock has been on a tear this year thanks to investor excitement over AI.
The company on Tuesday revealed several partnerships and new products, demonstrating how its technology can advance artificial intelligence in myriad industries. Nvidia says ChatGPT, the AI program that's created a firestorm of interest, is just the start. Nvidia issued about two dozen press releases and blog posts at its GTC 2023 conference outlining its AI plans.
In a keynote presentation at the conference, Chief Executive Jensen Huang said artificial intelligence is at an inflection point.
"We are at the iPhone moment of AI," Huang said.
At GTC, Huang announced partnerships with Alphabet's Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others. The alliances aim to bring AI, simulation and collaboration capabilities to every industry, he said.
Nvidia Stock A Top Performer This Year
"The impressive capabilities of generative AI have created a sense of urgency for companies to re-imagine their products and business models," Huang said.
On the stock market today, Nvidia stock climbed 1.2% to close at 261.99. Year to date, through Tuesday's close, Nvidia stock is up 79.3%, vs. a 4.3% gain for the S&P 500 index.
At the company's GTC conference, Nvidia announced new computer hardware and software libraries to enable AI breakthroughs.
Nvidia also said it will offer its DGX AI supercomputer platform as a service through cloud-computing partners. The DGX Cloud service will run first on Oracle Cloud. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and others will follow soon, Huang said.
DGX Cloud will give enterprises immediate access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced models for generative AI and other applications.
Nvidia Touts Platforms For Generative AI
Nvidia also announced Nvidia AI Foundations, a family of cloud services for customers needing to build and run custom large language models and generative AI trained with their proprietary data. Generative AI such as chatbot ChatGPT and text-to-image generator Dall-E have captured the imaginations of enterprises and investors.
AI Foundations services come in three modalities. NeMo is for building text-to-text generative AI models. Picasso is for generating images, videos and 3D models from text. And BioNeMo is for the biotech industry to develop new drugs.
Adobe, Getty Images and Shutterstock are using Picasso. Meanwhile, Amgen and AstraZeneca are among the early BioNeMo customers.
Also, Nvidia hopes to accelerate semiconductor breakthroughs with its cuLitho software library for computational lithography. The fabless semiconductor company is working on cuLitho with chip-gear vendor ASML, chip foundry TSMC and chip design software firm Synopsys.
Huang said cuLitho will help achieve integrated circuits at 2 nanometers and smaller. Features on semiconductors are measured in nanometers, which are one-billionth of a meter.
Nvidia Stock On Leaderboard List
Nvidia stock has an IBD Composite Rating of 98 out of 99, according to IBD Stock Checkup. That puts it in the top 2% of stocks for technical and fundamental performance over the last 12 months.
Nvidia stock is on the IBD Leaderboard list as well as the IBD Tech Leaders list.
Evercore ISI analyst C.J. Muse reiterated his outperform rating on Nvidia stock ahead of the conference.
"Given recent market developments, we believe primary investor focus will be on generative AI" at GTC, Muse said in a note to clients. "We believe Nvidia is uniquely positioned to win in this market."
Follow Patrick Seitz on Twitter at @IBD_PSeitz for more stories on consumer technology, software and semiconductor stocks.
