The A.I. chip boom is pushing Nvidia toward $1 trillion, but it won’t help Intel and AMD
Nvidia stock surged close to a $1 trillion market cap in after-hours trading Wednesday after it reported a shockingly strong strong forward outlook and CEO Jensen Huang said the company was going to have a “giant record year.”
Sales are up because of spiking demand for the graphics processors (GPUs) that Nvidia makes, which power AI applications like those at Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
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Demand for AI chips in datacenters spurred Nvidia to guide to $11 billion in sales during the current quarter, blowing away analyst estimates of $7.15 billion.
“The flashpoint was generative AI,” Huang said in an interview with CNBC. “We know that CPU scaling has slowed, we know that accelerated computing is the path forward, and then the killer app showed up.”
Nvidia believes it’s riding a distinct shift in how computers are built that could result in even more growth — parts for data centers could even become a $1 trillion market, Huang says.
Historically, the most important part in a computer or server had been the central processor, or the CPU, That market was dominated by Intel, with AMD as its chief rival.
With the advent of AI applications that require a lot of computing power, the graphics processor (GPU) is taking center stage, and the most advanced systems are using as many as eight GPUs to one CPU. Nvidia currently dominates the market for AI GPUs.
“The data center of the past, which was largely CPUs for file retrieval, is going to be, in the future, generative data,” Huang said. “Instead of retrieving data, you’re going to retrieve some data, but you’ve got to generate most of the data using AI.”
“So instead of instead of millions of CPUs, you’ll have a lot fewer CPUs, but they will be connected to millions of GPUs,” Huang continued.
For example, Nvidia’s own DGX systems, which are essentially an AI computer for training in one box, use eight of Nvidia’s high-end H100 GPUs, and only two CPUs.
Google’s A3 supercomputer pairs eight H100 GPUs alongside a single high-end Xeon processor made by Intel.
That’s one reason why Nvidia’s data center business grew 14% during the first calendar quarter versus flat growth for AMD’s data center unit and a decline of 39% in Intel’s AI and Data Center business unit.
Plus, Nvidia’s GPUs tend to be more expensive than many central processors. Intel’s most recent generation of Xeon CPUs can cost as much as $17,000 at list price. A single Nvidia H100 can sell for $40,000 on the secondary market.
Nvidia will face increased competition as the market for AI chips heats up. AMD has a competitive GPU business, especially in gaming, and Intel has its own line of GPUs as well. Startups are building new kinds of chips specifically for AI, and mobile-focused companies like Qualcomm and Apple keep pushing the technology so that one day it might be able to run in your pocket, not in a giant server farm. Google and Amazon are designing their own AI chips.
But Nvidia’s high-end GPUs remain the chip of choice for current companies building applications like ChatGPT, which are expensive to train by processing terabytes of data, and are expensive to run later in a process called “inference,” which uses the model to generate text, images, or make predictions.
Analysts say that Nvidia remains in the lead for AI chips because of its proprietary software that makes it easier to use all of the GPU hardware features for AI applications.
Huang said on Wednesday that the company’s software would not be easy to replicate.
“You have to engineer all of the software and all of the libraries and all of the algorithms, integrate them into and optimize the frameworks, and optimize it for the architecture, not just one chip but the architecture of an entire data center,” Huang said on a call with analysts.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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