How Nvidia is dominating an AI-obsessed earnings season without even reporting yet

• Nvidia is dominating earnings season, and it hasn't even reported results yet.
• Other mega-cap tech giants have been mentioning on earnings calls that they're boosting investment in AI infrastructure.
• Nvidia offers the popular H100 GPU chip that many companies use, and was specifically name-checked in some instances.

Nvidia is dominating first-quarter earnings season, and it hasn't even reported its results yet.

The company has received several nods, both directly and indirectly, from mega-cap tech companies that it counts as some of its biggest customers.

Words like "AI Infrastructure" and "generative AI" and "infrastructure capex" consistently popped up on the earnings calls of Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms, and it all points to more money being directed to Nvidia for its incredibly popular H100 GPU chip.

Nvidia's H100 GPU, which costs upwards of $40,000, enables the AI technologies that make ChatGPT, Anthropic, and other generative AI platforms possible.

The company is gearing up for the release of its next-generation AI chip, named Blackwell, later this year.

Elon Musk shouts out Nvidia's AI chips

Perhaps the biggest vote of confidence for Nvidia during this earnings season came from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said on his company's earnings call that the electric vehicle manufacturer will more than double its H100 GPU chips by the end of the year.

"We've installed and commissioned, meaning they're actually working, 35,000 H100 computers or GPUs," Musk said last month. "Roughly 35,000 H100s are active, and we expect that to be probably 85,000 or thereabouts by the end of this year." 

Musk said the H100s are helping Tesla further improve its Full Self-Driving software. 

Mega-cap tech's AI spending is soaring

Meta Platforms said it was increasing its forecasted capital expenditures for 2024 to a range of $35 billion to $40 billion from a prior range of $30 billion to $37 billion. The increase, according to Meta, is primarily being driven by the buildout of its "infrastructure investments to support our AI roadmap."

In January, Meta said it would buy 350,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia in 2024, but a recent update from the company's head of AI, Yann LeCun, suggests that the company has bought even more H100 chips in recent months.

Speaking at the Forging the Future of Business with AI summit last month, LeCun and host John Werner said that Meta has bought an additional 500,000 GPUs from Nvidia, bringing its total to 1 million with a retail value of about $30 billion.

Microsoft has similar ambitions and said it hopes to amass a war chest of 1.8 million GPUs by the end of 2024, according to an internal document.

Alphabet said its first-quarter CAPEX was $12 billion, or about double from the prior year, driven "overwhelmingly by investment in our technical infrastructure with the largest component for servers followed by data centers."

Microsoft said it expects $50 billion in capital expenditures in its upcoming fiscal year, and its fiscal third-quarter spending soared almost 80% to $14 billion. 

And while Amazon didn't detail its capital expenditure plans, it did say it expects to spend more money.

"We anticipate our overall capital expenditures to meaningfully increase year-over-year in 2024, primarily driven by higher infrastructure capex to support growth in AWS, including generative AI," Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said.

Altogether, the combined capex of Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon is expected to reach $205 billion this year, representing a 40% increase from 2023 levels, according to UBS. And a good chunk of that money will likely be funneled to Nvidia for its H100 and Blackwell AI chips. 

Nvidia has competition, but it still dominates

Recent earnings results from Nvidia's rival, AMD, suggest that most of this business is going to Nvidia and not its competitors.

AMD said its MI300 AI chip would generate revenue of about $4 billion in 2024, which pales in comparison to Nvidia's expected revenue of more than $100 billion this year. 

Meanwhile, Intel recently unveiled its Gaudi 3 AI chip that will compete with Nvidia, but it said it expects the chip to generate only $500 million in sales this year. 

Investors will have to wait until after the market close on May 22 to hear what Nvidia's earnings results actually are.