By Thomas Yeung
Publication Date: 2026-02-01 17:00:00
Tom Yeung here with your Sunday Digest.
It would have been easy to overlook Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) in 2022, the year ChatGPT was launched. Chipmakers were notoriously cyclical beasts, and Nvidia had its own history of losing money. Any investors who bought Nvidia in 2021 would have been sitting on 50% losses by the time ChatGPT hit the market.
Or in 2000… 2004… 2009… 2011… or 2018.
In fact, Nvidia fell at least 50% in 13 of the 26 years since the firm went public. PC demand is extremely lumpy. So, much like autos and airlines, the chipmaking industry was marked by high investment costs, cyclical demand, and a regular parade of high-profile bankruptcies.
However, ChatGPT has created a lasting significant change in chip appetite. Unlike regular PC users, data centers that run these AI models demand more… more… more computing power every day and are willing to pay for it.
Nvidia’s latest GB200 Blackwell Superchip now sells for up to $70,000 apiece… provided you can get your hands on one. Even its last-generation H100 chips routinely exchange hands for over $20,000 on the secondary market.
No PC gamer – Nvidia’s pre-2022 main clients – would ever spend those sums on a graphics card for their home computer.
In addition, every cloud computing giant has become terrified of falling behind in the AI race. America’s (and China’s) largest tech firms are paying top dollar for the best hardware, pushing prices of AI…
