NVIDIA registered the second biggest one-day increase in capitalization ever last week, following the incredibly positive Q1 2024 earnings where the tech company managed to beat quarterly revenue expectations by 13% while forecasting much higher (a 55% increase) revenue than previously estimated for the next quarter.
In the span of a single day, NVIDIA’s market capitalization rose by $224.19 billion, the largest one-day jump with the exception of PetroChina’s groundbreaking $597 billion increase back in 2007. The company is now close to the trillion dollar capitalization, not too far from the Big Tech club of Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.
This incredible achievement is largely due to NVIDIA’s timely investments in AI hardware and software. Indeed, as recapped by our hardware colleagues, CEO Jensen Huang’s Computex 2023 keynote focused a lot on AI news and announcements. However, over the thirty years of its existence, NVIDIA has been primarily known as a graphics card unit (GPU) manufacturer, as Wccftech readers know very well.
During a roundtable Q&A at Computex 2023, PC World’s Gordon Ung asked NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang whether PC gamers are right to fear that the company’s attention has shifted elsewhere. Huang seemed a little taken back by that idea, pointing out that the first AI project was the creation of DLSS for gamers and the first
Number one, RTX was invented for gamers and for RTX, the technology, the most important technology is AI. Without AI, we could not do ray tracing in real time. It was not even possible. And the first AI project in our company—the number one AI focus was Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Deep learning. That is the pillar of RTX.
Number two, notice what we did with generative AI, the first application was ACE—Avatar Cloud Engine—you hurt my feeling so deeply.
The NVIDIA CEO is definitely correct on both counts. Deep Learning Super Sampling was instrumental in delivering a much needed performance boost for PC games in the UltraHD era. NVIDIA kept investing in DLSS over the years, providing a significant quality improvement from DLSS 1.0 to DLSS 2.0, while the latest DLSS 3.0 (Frame Generation) is all about increasing performance even further especially in CPU-bound games.
The newly announced Avatar Cloud Engine is also extremely exciting. At Computex 2023, NVIDIA demonstrated how generative AI models can be used to interact with non-player characters (NPCs) by speaking to them via microphone and receiving realistic, dynamic responses based on what the characters should know rather than a mere list of predefined replies.
We’ve previously covered some examples of that (the Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim mods crafted by Bloc and powered by Inworld AI), but NVIDIA offers a comprehensive solution with ACE between the NeMo large language model, the Riva automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech tool, and the Omniverse Audio2Face application that generates realistic facial animations based on audio. Audio2Face is already being used in games like STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl by GSC Game World and Fort Solis by Fallen Leaf.
The possibilities to enhance games with generative AI are nearly endless, and NVIDIA seems keen to stay at the forefront of this revolution. As such, Huang’s statement comes as no surprise, but it’s still a welcome reassurance for any PC gamers who might have felt like they’d be sidelined in the company’s view.
