Nvidia, a maker of computer and video game chips expected to play a crucial role in the development of new Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects, is poised to reach a market capitalization of close to $1 trillion. to 80% of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product (GDP). About to cross the threshold of the Olympus of the great North American technologies, ahead of Meta and on the heels of Amazon. Still far from Google and above all from the 2.5 billion Microsoft.
Nvidia billed about 26,000 million dollars last year and has skyrocketed after announcing that it expected spectacular growth in its income in the current year. Despite brilliant expectations, this market capitalization multiplies 30 times the billing and 60 times the benefits that the company projects for its current fiscal year, which ends next year.
According to the experts, this company, directed by Jensen Huang, is one of the best placed to be one of the absolute winners of the "fourth industrial revolution" that those involved in AI announce all the time. And in fact, it is one of the few with the capacity to offer what the leading companies in this field are now asking for. The company says it hopes to be the first supplier of advanced AI chips. Although there are also unknowns, since its chips are manufactured in Taiwan and it is one of the companies that may be greatly affected by the commercial and technological blockade of the Joe Biden administration to China.
Huang refers to his company's situation as the "iPhone moment," referring to the mobile phone revolution and the explosive market growth unleashed by the product created by Apple. But valuations such as those indicated fall short of the crazy prices that reached most of the dotcoms at the end of the last century and that ended, as is well known, with a resounding crash into the ground in record time. In addition, legions of software start-ups and apps bustle under the radar of companies like the one mentioned above, registering insane valuations without being backed by any concrete results. Capital seeks them with passion.
It is not about questioning the importance and the dangers, the ambivalent technological, social and economic consequences of the latest AI developments. But global interconnectedness - 24-hour markets, platforms, social networks, media - triggers and propagates the expectations and endless greed of investors and users on a scale unknown in financial history. The bubbles have gone from singular events that occurred once every many years, there were times when there was only one every century, to frequent episodes that are part of everyday life. Like employee of the month.
Hardly out of the end of the cryptocurrency mirage and the UK pension funds were already giving scares. Months later it was the turn of the US bank, which is trying to find out what the next campaign will be. And as the world is searching extremely hard for a new source of exponential and rapid get-rich, the next one will soon emerge.
The AI has all the numbers to be the great protagonist. And a character is playing a special role in the propagation of the new dogma that keeps the speculators of the planet in suspense. This is Sam Altman, founder of Open AI, the company that created Chat GPT, a character who already stood out in the development of the deceased cryptocurrencies. In fact, he is part of the constellation of megarichs nourished by the heat of the technological revolution focused on Silicon Valley, like Elon Musk, to give a well-known example. With them he founded OpenAI. In Delia Rodríguez's Artificial newsletter in La Vanguardia you can read a revealing profile of the character.
For some time now, analysts have considered it evident that to reach maturity, their AI project needed more money, much more. Like the investment of "billions" of Bill Gates' company, Microsoft, recently announced and added to another 1,000 contributions that he already contributed initially.
The next step has been that of politics. Preceded by a wave of unparalleled admiration, Altman has intervened in the US Congress and has traveled halfway around the world to meet with heads of government, including several Europeans -the Spanish Pedro Sánchez, the French Emmanuel Macron, or the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton among others. A good clue about the ambitions of an entrepreneur who aspires to conquer the world, in the literal sense. The initial release of it is being on that scale. An unprecedented global marketing campaign that has the political elite as a special guest.
Probably the audience was so softened by the doomsday warnings about the danger of the new tool you have created, that it has made no one doubt your good intentions. A candidness that can take its toll.
Altman has called for a global regulator for the new universe of AI and for a tight rein on new ventures in this new world. He calls on the EU to think long before proposing rules of the game that do not seem right to him. Without a doubt, he wants to anticipate the action of governments and probably thinks of being the one who defines the rules. It is the clearest indication that the dimension in which he intends to operate is global and he does not want fragmented jurisdictions. He is the so-called market unit but on the scale of the new globalization. But, technological and moral considerations aside, it is a business. And you are already at the center of the next financial storm.
