Investors Shrug Off Nvidia’s ‘A.I. Woodstock’

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., unveiled the company’s latest A.I. chip yesterday as it hopes to build on its dominance in the sector.Credit…Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Are investors buying Nvidia’s latest A.I. vision?

Nvidia’s stock has soared more than fivefold since ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, a rally that has vaulted the chipmaker into the trillion-dollar market cap club on the back of investor fervor for artificial intelligence — and the high-end processors that power these models.

But shares in Nvidia are down in premarket trading on Tuesday after investors gave the first day of the company’s annual developer conference (known as “A.I. Woodstock”) a tough grade. That’s even after the semiconductor company introduced its latest chip, which is capable of running increasingly complex computing models.

Big money is expected to continue flowing into A.I. Nvidia and its peers (and their shareholders) have been the first to profit from this investment shift. But during a two-hour keynote speech on Monday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., painted a vision of A.I. turbocharging computing power, leading to a boom in robotics, autonomous transport, concierge-style retail and drugs discovery.

The new chip, Blackwell, will be “the engine to power this new industrial revolution,” he said. To underscore that, Nvidia recruited more than 100 customers — including from Amazon and the U.S. Army — to show off how they’re using the company’s hardware in their businesses.

“One hundred trillion dollars of the world’s industries are represented in this room today,” Huang said to cheers from the packed SAP Center in San Jose, Calif. (Huang said that the event was no rock concert, before making a joking reference to Taylor Swift, who has performed there.)