A microchip and the Nvidia logo displayed on a phone screen are seen in this photo taken in Krakow, Poland, on April 10, 2023.
Nurphoto | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence and semiconductor chip stocks rallied after U.S. chip design firm Nvidia beat Wall Street’s expectations for fourth-quarter earnings and revenue on Wednesday and projected “continued growth” in 2025 and beyond.
Nvidia supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company jumped as much as 2.05% in Thursday morning trade. TSMC is the world’s largest contract chip maker and produces advanced processors for companies like Nvidia and iPhone maker Apple.
Shares of server component supplier Super Micro Computer rose 11.42% in Wednesday’s after-hours trading. Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML, which supplies TSMC lithography machines critical to chip making, jumped 2.7% in the U.S. during after hours trading.
Following Nvidia’s earnings report, rivals Advanced Micro Devices and SoftBank-backed U.K. chip designer Arm Holdings surged 4.08% and 7.87%, respectively, in after hours trading.
Nvidia, which custom designs AI chips for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, saw skyrocketing demand for its graphics processing units thanks to the AI boom.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which gained massive popularity worldwide in November 2022 for its ability to generate human-like responses to user prompts, is trained and run on thousands of Nvidia’s GPUs. Nvidia shares rose 9% in extended trading.
South Korea’s memory chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix gained 0.41% and 3.22% respectively on Thursday. Large language models such as ChatGPT rely on high-performance memory chips to remember details from past conversations and user preferences in order to generate humanlike responses.
Other Taiwanese semiconductor firms Orient Semiconductor Electronics and MediaTek rose 2.94% and 1.53% respectively on Thursday.
Intel, Broadcom and Qualcomm, three U.S. chip makers, saw increases in share prices in extending trading Wednesday, surging 1.38%, 2.79% and 1.80% respectively.
“Fundamentally, the conditions are excellent for continued growth” in 2025 and beyond, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told analysts on Wednesday in an earnings call. He added that demand for Nvidia GPUs will remain high due to generative AI and an industry-wide shift away from central processors to the accelerators that Nvidia makes.
“If I was going to just kind of put a stake in the ground relative to the conversation, whether it’s related to market share or to their margins, I think they’re going to surprise people,” Gene Munster, managing partner of Deepwater Asset Management, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Thursday.
