Nvidia’s rocketship has room for more passengers

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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NEWSWORTHY

Teen hacker convicted. Though Nvidia is the apple of investors’ eyes, it’s not immune to hackers. Two teens—one 17, one 18—have been found guilty for roles in the Lapsus$ cybercrime gang that hacked Uber, Nvidia, and Rockstar Games, among others, in 2021 and 2022.

TikTok’s big shopping investment. ByteDance-owned social giant TikTok is on track to lose more than $500 million this year as a result of the company’s push into e-commerce, reports The Information. This is because the company is spending on hiring, building a delivery network, and merchant subsidization—all in the hope of generating $200 billion in annual customer orders. 

A.I. goes back to school—or does it? As classes resume, the role of A.I. remains unclear. Teachers who previously banned large language models like ChatGPT and Bard are now figuring out how to incorporate the technologies into curricula. Still, it remains unclear how the technology will complement, rather than negate, learning.

ON OUR FEED

“Don't sleep on linkedin, folks. It still ends up generating real distribution for 776 cos”

—Reddit and 776 Ventures cofounder Alexis Ohanian on X, sharing a picture of LinkedIn analytics showing that his personal posts on the platform generated 1.5 million impressions during 28 days.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

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Spotify’s CEO revealed fears about being an ‘unreasonable’ boss—then Elon Musk, Mark Cuban and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian all piled in by Eleanor Pringle 

All Raise’s new CEO confronts a changing landscape for diversity in VC by Emma Hinchliffe and Joseph Abrams 

Bank CEO ordered employees to return to the office for their own mental health—and it’s sparked backlash by Orianna Rosa Royle

BEFORE YOU GO

Burning Man delayed. Due to flooding in the desert, the festival, known for sex, drugs, and prohibitive costs, has been rained out—for now. 

The Black Rock City festival’s fans include tech royalty like Elon Musk, Dustin Moskovitz, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. Though it has become a meme-ified red flag, Eric Schmidt’s experience at Burning Man reportedly helped mint him as Google’s CEO in 2001. An experience on "the playa" led late Zappos founder Tony Hsieh to discover ketamine, which played a significant role in his descent and death at age 46, per the biography Wonder Boy. 

Maybe rain is absolutely fine for this parade.