Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has long claimed that the world’s data centres will need to be completely overhauled to handle the demands of generative AI. He argues that it will take $1tn over the next four to five years, essentially doubling the amount already sunk into digital infrastructure, to train and run the new AI models.
Nvidia itself has been the most obvious beneficiary of this. Its vertiginous stock market rise has turned it into the world’s most valuable company.
But a spate of earnings announcements and AI-related deals over the last two weeks has also brought encouraging evidence that the boom sparked by the launch of OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT is spreading. Of course, there is no way of telling whether the wave of spending will be sustainable or large enough to justify the huge run-up in tech stocks, but it has at least brought some comfort for the bulls.