NVIDIA is doing very well for itself, so much so that the chip maker has overtaken Alphabet, Google's parent company, to become the third most valuable company in the United States, Reuters reports. The news comes almost immediately after NVIDIA pushed past Amazon in the rankings, with the company now valued at 1.83 trillion. Worldwide, it sits in fourth, behind American companies Microsoft ( 3.04 trillion) and Apple ( 2.84 trillion) and the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco ( 2.07 trillion). AI's boom over the last year is largely to thank for NVIDIA's jump in valuation, with about 80 percent of the high-end chip market in its hands. It created the H100 chip, which powers LLMs at OpenAI, Amazon, Meta and more.

Innovation and good timing combined to make California's Nvidia the dominant firm for AI computer chips.

Perhaps no tech company, not even Microsoft or Google, is better poised than Nvidia to reap significant near-term benefits from the race to build up generative artificial-intelligence capabilities. Here is the problem: Everyone already knows it. Nvidia's share price has more than doubled over the past six months. That makes it the best performing stock in the entire S&P 500 in that time. The chip maker's market value has now surpassed that of Tesla and Facebook-parent Meta Platforms and is close to eclipsing Berkshire Hathaway--all much larger companies in terms of annual revenue.

Graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. issued a muted outlook and reported a sharp decline in quarterly sales, driven by waning consumer demand for its videogaming chips after a pandemic-fueled boom and the onset of the cryptowinter. America's largest chip company by value on Wednesday said revenue fell 17% to $5.93 billion after gaming-segment sales more than halved in its fiscal third quarter. Net profit was $680 million. The sales were above expectations in a survey of analysts by FactSet, but net profit fell short. A flood of Nvidia's products are being unloaded by people who had used them in calculation-intensive cryptocurrency mining that may be denting demand, Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said.

This has been a rough year for tech stocks--but there could be reason to hope for long-term growth. Market volatility, supply-chain issues and rising inflation have all contributed to the selloff. Morningstar research also suggests that big tech companies could see a significant hit to third-quarter earnings as a strong dollar eats into profits from abroad. Many exchange-traded funds that focus on tech-stock themes have had an equally rough go. The two largest semiconductor ETFs, iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) and VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), were trading near 52-week lows at quarter's end.

TOKYO--Overall demand for semiconductors may be softening, but the world's biggest auto maker says it still can't get its hands on enough chips. Toyota Motor Corp. on Tuesday lowered its Toyota and Lexus production target for the current fiscal year through March to 9.2 million units from a previous goal of 9.7 million, citing the risk of chip-supply issues. The situation reflects prolonged underinvestment in certain older types of chips that are particularly needed by car makers. While slowing demand for smartphones and personal computers has eased shortages of memory and other chips and sparked fears of a glut, pockets of constrained supply remain. Analysts and chip executives say the supply-demand mismatch could drag on for years.

The development of China's artificial intelligence sector is expected to be slowed in the coming few years by the United States' new ban on exports of several high-end chips made by Nvidia and AMD, say Chinese IT experts. Nvidia said last Friday it had been informed by the US government that it must stop exporting its graphics processing unit (GPU) chips, namely A100 and H100, to China and Russia. It said its DGX, an AI server, was also barred from being shipped to China if a unit contained the two chips. At the same time, media reports said the US had also restricted sales of AMD's MI250 Accelerator AI chip to China. China's Foreign Ministry said the US had typically exerted its "sci-tech hegemony" and violated the rules of the market economy with its latest chip-export restrictions.

The wireless industry has been one of the fastest growing spaces for several decades. That does not mean, however, that it is always on fire. Every growth wave has ebbs and flows. It all depends on the period of time in which you are focused. The good news is the wireless industry has entered the next growth wave with 5G, AI, IoT, AR, VR, cloud and more.

Qualcomm can live without Google, but life without Apple would be more difficult. The market keeps pricing the chip maker for the latter eventuality. Alphabet's Google announced Monday that its coming line of new Pixel smartphones will be powered by its own in-house processor. The chip, called Tensor, has been specially designed for artificial intelligence uses, though Google didn't say much about its capabilities in its announcement. But the new chip does take over the slot that has been occupied by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor for the past five generations of Pixel, since Google first launched the smartphone in 2016.

The one-of-a-kind, 180-ton machines are used by companies including Intel Corp. INTC -1.51%, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. and leading Apple Inc. supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to make the chips in everything from cutting-edge smartphones and 5G cellular equipment to computers used for artificial intelligence. China wants the $150-million machines for domestic chip makers, so smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co. and other Chinese tech companies can be less reliant on foreign suppliers. But ASML hasn't sent a single one because the Netherlands--under pressure from the U.S.--is withholding an export license to China. The Biden administration has asked the government to restrict sales because of national-security concerns, according to U.S. officials. The stance is a holdover from the Trump White House, which first identified the strategic value of the machine and reached out to Dutch officials.