Nvidia shares jump after CEO Jensen Huang unveils new chips
Nvidia shares jumped 1.7% on Tuesday to a new all-time high after CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company’s next family of gaming chips and hinted that robotics technology is about to ramp up.
Huang unveiled the latest chips for desktop and laptop PCs during his keynote speech Monday night at CES in Las Vegas, the massive tech trade show with the latest gadgets, promising to deliver better-quality images.
The stock, which already had risen to a new high on Monday ahead of the chief executive’s address, was trading at $151.94 as of Tuesday around 9:30 a.m.
The GeForce RTX 50-series chips use the same Blackwell architecture as the firm’s artificial intelligence processors – and are twice as speedy as their predecessors, Huang said. The chips will come preinstalled in computers costing $550 to $2,000 that will start shipping in March, the company said.
“Can you imagine, you have this incredible graphics card, Blackwell – I’m going to shrink it and put it in there,” Huang said as he held up a laptop.
CES 2025 featured more robots and artificial intelligence features than ever before – and the longtime Nvidia CEO hinted that advanced robot infrastructure is coming soon.
The “ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” he said Monday night.
He introduced an AI model called Cosmos which could generate training videos for robots and self-driving cars – and drastically reduce the costs of current training methods, he said.
“All of the enabling technologies that I’ve been talking about is going to make it possible for us in the next several years to see very rapid breakthroughs, surprising breakthroughs in general robotics,” he added.
Nvidia has skyrocketed past $3.5 trillion in market cap over the past few years – surpassing Apple to grow into the world’s most valuable company in November 2024.
For most of its existence, since its launch in the early 1990s, Nvidia has been known for selling graphics processing units, or GPUs, used to make video games. Its first chip in 1999 was made to draw triangles and polygons for 3D games.
But Nvidia has shot to new heights by selling artificial intelligence chips to cloud vendors and tech giants including Microsoft, Meta and Google – outpacing rivals like Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. Its dominance in the AI market has led to some increased regulatory scrutiny from watchdog groups in the US, Europe, South Korea and China.
Now, gaming sales represent just a drop in the bucket of Nvidia’s business. In the quarter that ended in October, gaming sales accounted for less than 10% of Nvidia’s total revenue – compared to 88% from data center chips.
But the newly-announced RTX 50-series chips are meant for gaming, with higher frame rates, the ability to show more details on character faces, improved graphics and higher resolution images.
The new generation of gaming chips will include a variety of configurations. The RTX 5090 – the most powerful, and thus most expensive of the bunch – will sell for $1,999 each. It is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090, with 92 billion transistors, Nvidia said.
The chips will be optimized to run AI models, so creators can fold generative AI into their video games.
Nvidia said the chips can also run large language models and image generation models from companies like Meta.
Nvidia’s gaming business has increased 15% from a year ago, though it has been overshadowed by tremendous growth in its AI chip sales. The company’s data center sales have doubled for six straight quarters to more than $30 billion in its most recent quarter.
“While we are now an AI company as well as a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits tremendously from the fact that we are an AI company,” Justin Walker, senior director of product at Nvidia, said on a press call.
