Just two weeks after Facebook set a record for the largest single-day increase in market valuation ($205bn), chipmaker Nvidia shot the lights out with a $272bn surge.
Unlike Facebook, which has been unmasked as the greatest enabler of paedophiles in history, Nvidia makes a real product in the real world — one that is useful.
Facebook is the epitome of surveillance capitalism and makes money from exploiting our personal data — and girls. Shame on anyone who still believes it is reaching its audiences when all its marketing money is doing is propping up a “vast paedophile network”, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal with researchers from Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Every day 100,000 children experience sexual harassment on Instagram and Facebook, according to Meta’s own documents, as revealed in a New Mexico attorney-general lawsuit last year.
“Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of paedophiles,” said senator Dick Durbin, the head of the US Senate judiciary committee, which grilled Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month, as well as the CEOs of X/Twitter, Snap, Discord and TikTok.
Nvidia, meanwhile, does something useful for society — and the stock markets are excited about the potential of its processors needed to power AI. Nvidia has grown its expertise and market share for making graphics processing units that the gaming industry has used for decades. Rendering the complex videos of games requires processors to perform multiple processes at the same time, which turns out to be the same requirements for AI applications.
Parents of gaming-obsessed teenagers can take some solace that their children’s infatuation with first-person-shooter games have helped advance humanity — albeit tangentially
Never has one industry (AI) owed so much to another (gaming). Parents of gaming-obsessed teenagers can take some solace that their children’s infatuation with first-person-shooter games have helped advance humanity — albeit tangentially.
The Nvidia numbers are extraordinary. The 16.4% share price increase pushed Nvidia’s valuation to $1.94-trillion, putting it in third place, behind tech giants Microsoft and Apple. Its $272bn increase is about that of the combined value of Goldman Sachs Group and Boeing, and much more than the combined value of carmakers Ford, General Motors and Stellantis ($176bn), according to data from TradingView.
Nvidia’s market cap is bigger than the GDP of all but 11 nations in 2022, including Brazil’s $1.92-trillion and Australia’s $1.69-trillion, according to Investopedia.
“Despite concerns over its high valuation, Nvidia’s unparalleled AI-related intellectual property, rooted in decades of visionary investment, sets it apart in a league of its own,” says Rosenblatt Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann. Like OpenAI, whose ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, Nvidia is central to the AI industry.
And the good news will keep on coming, says Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” he said.
“We are one year into generative AI,” Huang told The New York Times. “My guess is we are literally into the first year of a 10-year cycle of spreading this technology into every single industry.”
*Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and executive director of Scrolla.Africa
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