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Nvidia is dominating earnings season and hasn't even reported results yet.
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Other mega-cap tech giants have mentioned on earnings calls that they are boosting investment in AI infrastructure.
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Nvidia offers the popular H100 GPU chip that many companies use, and in some cases it was specifically name-checked.
Nvidia is dominating the first quarter earnings season and hasn't even reported results yet.
The company has received several kudos both directly and indirectly from mega-cap tech companies that it counts among its largest customers.
Words like “AI infrastructure,” “generative AI,” and “infrastructure investments” consistently popped up on the company's earnings calls Microsoft, Alphabet, AmazonAnd Metaplatformsand it all points to more money going to Nvidia for its incredibly popular H100 GPU chip.
Nvidia's H100 GPU, which costs more than $40,000, powers the AI technologies that power ChatGPT, Anthropic, and other generative AI platforms.
The company is gearing up to release its next-generation AI chip, called Blackwell, later this year.
Elon Musk calls out Nvidia's AI chips
Perhaps the biggest vote of confidence for Nvidia came during this earnings season Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said in his company's earnings call that the electric vehicle maker will more than double its H100 GPU chips by the end of the year.
“We have installed and deployed 35,000 H100 computers, or GPUs, which means they really work,” Musk said last month. “There are about 35,000 H100s active, and we expect that will probably be about 85,000 by the end of this year.”
Musk said the H100s will help Tesla further improve its Full Self-Driving software.
Mega-cap tech's AI spending is skyrocketing
Meta Platforms said it is increasing its expected 2024 capital expenditures to a range of $35 billion to $40 billion, up from a previous range of $30 billion to $37 billion. According to Meta, the increase is mainly caused by the expansion of its “infrastructure investments to support our AI roadmap.”
In January, Meta said it would buy 350,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia in 2024, but a recent update from the company's head of AI, Yann LeCun, suggests the company has purchased even more H100 chips in recent months.
LeCun and host John Werner spoke at the Forging the Future of Business with AI summit last month said Meta bought another 500,000 GPUs from Nvidia, bringing the total to 1 million with a retail value of about $30 billion.
Microsoft has similar ambitions and has said so hopes to amass a war chest of 1.8 million GPUs by the end of 2024, according to an internal document.
Alphabet said first-quarter CAPEX was $12 billion, or about double the previous year, “overwhelmingly driven by investments in our technical infrastructure with the largest component being servers, followed by data centers.”
Microsoft said it expects $50 billion in capital expenditures in the coming fiscal year, and that spending rose nearly 80% to $14 billion in the third quarter of the fiscal year.
And while Amazon didn't detail its investment plans, it did say it expects to spend more money.
“We expect our total capital expenditures to increase significantly year-over-year in 2024, primarily driven by higher infrastructure investments to support growth in AWS, including generative AI,” said Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky.
In total, the combined capital investment of Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon is expected to reach $205 billion this year, which according to UBS represents a 40% increase over 2023 levels. And a good chunk of that money will likely go to Nvidia is being tapped for its H100 and Blackwell AI chips.
Nvidia has competition, but still dominates
Recent earnings results from Nvidia's rival, AMD, suggest that most of these sales go to Nvidia and not to its competitors.
AMD said the MI300 AI chip would generate sales of about $4 billion in 2024, which pales in comparison to Nvidia's projected sales of more than $100 billion this year.
In the meantime, Intel recently unveiled its Gaudi 3 AI chip that will compete with Nvidia, but expects the chip to generate only $500 million in sales this year.
Investors will have to wait until after the market closes on May 22 to hear what Nvidia's earnings results actually are.
Read the original article Business insider
