"…For Nvidia, after this latest run-up took it north of the $3T milestone, the company is being valued at more than $100M for each of its 29,600 employees (per its filing that counted up to the end of Jan 2024).
That’s more than 5x any of its big tech peers, and hundreds of times higher than more labor-intensive companies like Walmart and Amazon. It is worth noting that Nvidia has very likely done some hiring since the end of January — I think the company might be in growth mode — but even if the HR department has been working non-stop, Nvidia will still be a major outlier on this simple measure.
We are running out of ways to describe Nvidia’s recent run… but a nine-figure valuation per employee is a new one."
This is definitely realistic and not an over valuation based on AI-hype investor brain rot. Like, they’re a fucking graphics card company. Like, sure graphics cards can do some cool linear algebra, and linear algebra can do some cool things… but I’m sorry, they’re not going to be earning as much as Apple or Microsoft, companies that sell the whole rest of the computer to people and/or the plurality of software that runs on it.
Technically, they don’t even make the actual graphics cards, they just design them and then outsource manufacturing to TSMC.
But don’t you know that doesn’t matter, because by 2028 every singe company in the world is going to need a data center filled with tens of thousands of AI accelerators turning their own scrape of the internet into a chatbot, and so one of the companies that makes thouse accelerators is definitely going to have as much business as companies that make half of everyone’s phones or computer software./s
Designing graphic cards is really fucking hard though plus they make the firmware.