Hey there, it’s tech reporter Alexandra Sternlicht.
If you or a loved one is an Nvidia shareholder, expect little party dances today. On Wednesday, Nvidia reported quarterly results and obliterated analysts’ already bullish hopes for the chipmaker that’s become a vital part of the infrastructure powering artificially intelligent technologies.
The company doubled its quarterly revenue to $13.5 billion and delivered earnings per share of $2.70, well above Wall Street targets. More importantly, it forecast sales in the current quarter of $16 billion, compared to the $12.5 billion that analysts expected, according to Bloomberg.
Dang.
"A new computing era has begun," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who got $4.2 billion richer as investors poured money into the company after the bell yesterday. "Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative A.I."
Industry analysts and investors seem to agree, declaring that Nvidia has officially earned its place in the club of the world’s most important tech companies, alongside Apple, Google, and Amazon.
“We view last night as a historical moment for the broader tech sector and a sneak preview of what is on the horizon,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives this morning. “Very simply, Nvidia’s guidance and commentary was at ‘drop the mic’ level, as investors now recognize crystal clear this A.I. demand story is as real as any tech trend we have seen in the last 30 years.”
It’s a remarkable turn of events for a company that not too long ago was known primarily as a maker of high-end graphics cards for PC gamers. To get a sense of how extensive Nvidia’s influence has become, and where it could go next, one need only look at where it’s hiring. Just today the company has posted upwards of 10 jobs that report to offices around the world.
The postings from this morning include multiple senior performance analysis engineer jobs. These employees are tasked with working on Spectrum-X, the company’s ethernet network platform that is designed for “the highest performance” of A.I., machine learning, and natural language processing. It’s unsurprising as it builds out chip networks that these jobs would be in high demand.
The company is also looking for a senior product manager for its omniverse developer platform. To put it simply, this is where metaverses are made. Per the post, this senior manager can make up to $310,000 annually and is expected to travel “20% of the time” for events, press tours, and customer meetings. It makes me wonder about the relationship between Nvidia and Meta after the social giant spent billions on Nvidia GPUs. Could a deep partnership between the two make Metaverse more of a relevant—and profitable—product for Meta?
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is also hiring multiple software engineers for deep learning solutions in autonomous vehicles. These folks are responsible for “building a close technical relationship with our automotive partners during product development” as well as coordinating with the “architecture and software teams to develop the best solution for partners working on our platforms,” says the post. After 10 Cruise vehicles jammed in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood this month, it seems like these roles could be essential to the success of AVs as a whole (for better or worse, Cruise parent GM makes its own chips).
Of course, Nvidia is hiring most in engineering, where there are a whopping 1,193 open roles (operations has the second-most open roles at 96).
In a year of seemingly non-stop tech layoffs, Nvidia’s success and hiring spree is something a lot of techies can celebrate.
Alexandra Sternlicht
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