Remember two weeks ago when Apple passed Nvidia in market capitalization? That’s now ancient history. At today’s close, Nvidia’s market capitalization was $1 trillion higher than Apple’s. In the past two weeks, Nvidia stock has risen 18% and Apple’s has fallen 10% or so. That seems to be mostly due to broad market dynamics, such as the state of the Iran war, but the fact that insatiable demand for Nvidia’s AI chips has sent chip rental prices through the roof may also have something to do with it. We got a reminder about the frothiness of demand for AI capacity right now from executives at two small Nvidia-backed cloud firms, CoreWeave and Nebius, speaking on earnings calls in the past two days. Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh revealed today that Nebius had held its first auction of computing capacity during the second quarter, with prices for Nvidia’s Blackwell generation of chips “15% above the highest price we ever charged before.” Volozh also said Nebius was selling more capacity closer to the time customers needed it to take advantage of high prices.
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