What happened
Tech stocks tied to the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution are roaring ahead this morning. As of 11:10 a.m. ET, shares of the eponymous AI stock, C3.ai (AI -0.85%), are up an astounding 16.7%, while Qualcomm (QCOM -0.20%), the self-proclaimed "on-device AI leader," is gaining 3.7%, and Nvidia (NVDA 3.71%), officially now the first $1 trillion semiconductor company, tacks on 5.5%.
So what
Granted, the majority of today's gains still probably owe to Nvidia's powerful sales guidance given in its fiscal first-quarter 2024 earnings report last week. Nvidia's earnings surged 28% in Q1, beating expectations by 16%, and with sales forecast to surge 64% higher in the second quarter, you can probably expect more earnings gains are on the way.
But over the weekend, Nvidia made huge efforts to keep the momentum going. The semiconductor giant released a flurry of press releases in the wake of earnings: On Saturday Nvidia, which got its start making graphics processing units for games, announced "a custom AI model foundry service" to improve how non-player characters in games perform using AI algorithms -- and confirmed that its GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip has entered full-rate production.
One day later, on Sunday, Nvidia announced it's connecting 256 of these Grace Hopper Superchips to create "a new class of large-memory AI supercomputer, dubbed the NVIDIA DGX supercomputer. Nvidia then wrapped up the weekend by announcing a faster networking platform to accelerate the performance of Ethernet-based AI clouds.
Now what
Investors are probably still trying to figure out what all this new whiz-bang technology from Nvidia will mean for the company on the bottom line. But with advances coming so fast, they're probably also afraid to wait to find out. Result: They're buying AI stocks first and asking questions later.
Meanwhile, other tech companies are just trying to stay relevant in a world where Nvidia is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. This morning, C3.ai joined in the fun with a press release of its own, announcing that Amazon will use C3 Generative AI technology on the Amazon Web Services marketplace. And Qualcomm got some positive press from Bloomberg, which reported this morning on Qualcomm's "2 billion AI-capable products" shipped -- Qualcomm's bet on building AI functionality into mobile devices, versus Nvidia's efforts to do most AI work at server farms and in the cloud.
Can Qualcomm succeed in changing the conversation on AI? Only time will tell.
All I can tell you as an investor is that, with everyone obsessing over Nvidia right now (at 218 times earnings), and C3 having scooped up the coveted "AI" ticker symbol (despite having no earnings), Qualcomm stock at 11.6 times earnings looks like a much safer bet to me.
