What is Nvidia? If you’re a committed gamer the question may sound like nonsense. Nvidia, which was founded in 1993, is a tech company that makes GPUs and other products. It originally specialized in making products for the video game industry, that assisted in 3D rendering. If you were a committed gamer, you probably owned their products. If you weren’t, you might not have heard of them.
But with sudden advances in artificial intelligence, it has been everywhere in the news because its products can also be used for artificial intelligence. Its fourth-quarter revenue from Q4 2022 to 2023 literally increased 265%.
A decade ago, its market capitalization hovered around $10 billion In 2016, it was around $50 billion.. As of April 2024, it was worth over $2 trillion. The Motley Fool ranked it third most valuable publicly traded company in the world, just behind Apple. It is now over five times more valuable than Walmart. It is one of the best-performing stocks of the last few years.
Sometimes the stock market, particularly tech stocks, are placed in a different mental bucket than traditional investments and stores of value, such as gold and silver.
But often precious metals are more closely connected to tech than some think.
And that is because one of the essential components in many of its products is gold. Nvidia uses various metals to make its products- gold of course, as well as tantalum, tungsten and tin. SchiffGold has long covered how demand for industrial silver use is forecasted to rise, but many high-tech industries depend on the industrial use of gold as well.
GPU microchips are made with gold as well as other metals like minum, silicon, and copper because of their useful conductive properties. Of course, the monetary value of gold provides an incentive to minimize its use, but the chemical properties of gold remain so useful that manufacturers continue to use gold in chips and sometimes in internal computer wiring and switches despite their cost.
As competition for the best GPUs heats up and the price of GPUs is likely going to rise due to advances in artificial intelligence, the cost of the metal in GPUs will become less relevant to the overall cost of gold.
This means that manufacturers can use more gold in their products without dramatically increasing the cost of their GPUs and other products.
Perhaps that’s why some savvy investors are betting on both gold and artificial intelligence companies.
One prominent example is Stanley Druckenmiller who shifted his allocation away from big tech and towards AI and gold.
More gold may currently be used for investment or jewelry than in high-tech, but it’s intriguing that humanity’s newest and most advanced technology, artificial intelligence, has looped around to depend on our oldest kind of money.
Gold’s resilience depends on its historic, current, and future usage as money. It’s buoyed by its beauty and use in jewelry and decoration. But its value is also driven by its unique chemical features that power the greatest technologies in the world.
The cost of gold encourages companies to seek alternatives to it, but its natural features guarantee that it’s still used as a vital component of computers and GPUs despite its cost.
