I have been speculating for the past 2 quarters that NVDA is using AI to enhance their business operations. It totally makes sense to me. Why wouldn’t the company that’s at the epicenter of artificial intelligence not utilize this technology to make its business more efficient, to speed its product development cycles, to compete better against the competition, to reduce the effort expended by its human employees, to report quarterly results fast (maybe faster than any other publicly traded company–not confirmed), to predict customer and market behavior, and to make better business decisions.
I heard a confirmatory statement by NVDA’s CFO, Colette Kress, during the prepared remarks of today’s Q4 earnings call. Here’s what she said when talking about the CapEx spend: [Nvidia is] investing in supercomputers for internal AI development." This statement was made around the 18 minute mark of the recorded earnings call.
While I had suspected that this was going on, this confirmatory statement is significant. AI is only going to get better and better and NVDA is making a conscious (human conscious…for now) effort to integrate AI into its business operations.
Now combine what Colette said with what Jensen Hwang said later in the call:
So, AI, think of AI really as, in the final analysis, the future way of developing software is a brand new capability where computers can write its own software and the software that’s written is so complex and so capable that no humans could write it ourselves. And so, you can teach, you can use data to teach a software to figure out how to write the software by itself. And then when you’re done developing the software, you can use it to do all kinds of stuff, including design products. And so for work stations that’s how it’s used.
Now let that sink in. Think of the implications. Perhaps NVDA is already allowing software to design next generation GPUs. Maybe that’s a big part of the reason how it’s possible to iterate products more quickly and how each generation (one a year apart) can be 10x better than the previous generation. What are the implications for NVDA? Well, they are going to sell their stuff to every business, either directly or through the cloud partners that will rent the AI capabilities by the minute in the cloud. The implications for NVDA? They will be the smartest company in the world because they know exactly how to best utilize AI to make them more competitive. And what are the implications for the world and the speed and acceleration of innovation? We shall see…
Chris