Nvidia adds $79 billion in market value after CEO Jensen Huang says ChatGPT represents an inflection point for artificial intelligence

• Nvidia soared after CEO Jensen Huang talked up the possibilities or artificial intelligence in its 4th-quarter earnings call.
• "The culmination of technology breakthroughs has brought AI to an inflection point," Huang said.
• Nvidia said it partnered with cloud services to launch DGX, an AI supercomputer accessible via web browsers.

Nvidia soared on Thursday after the company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings results and talked up the potential artificial intelligence will have on its business.

The stock surged as much as 15% in Thursday trades, adding $79 billion in value to the company's market capitalization.

While the earnings beat was small, the real excitement was during the companies earnings call, in which CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia is working hard to capitalize on artificial intelligence as ChatGPT captures the imagination of millions of people around the world.

"The culmination of technology breakthroughs has brought AI to an inflection point," Huang said, adding that companies around the world are racing to incorporate the capabilities of generative language models into their businesses.

But the computing power necessary for a company to adopt in-house AI capabilities is enormous, and that's where Nvidia's new service offering comes in. Dubbed "DGX Cloud," Nvidia is offering an AI supercomputer accessible to its customers via a web browser. The company partnered with various cloud providers, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, to launch the service.

"Nvidia AI as a service offers enterprises easy access to the world's most advanced AI platform, while remaining close to the storage, networking, security and cloud services offered by the world's most advanced clouds," Huang explained.

"Nvidia AI is essentially the operating system of AI systems today," Huang also said.

The excitement around artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, and Nvidia's ability to monetize this has led to praise from Wall Street analysts, including Goldman Sachs.

Goldman upgraded Nvidia stock to "Buy" from "Neutral" in a Thursday note, admitting that it "was wrong" to sit on the sidelines in anticipation of a pullback in the company's fundamentals.

"We believe the acceleration in AI development/adoption across cloud hyperscalers as well as enterprises will, if anything, serve to extend the company's leadership position as customers with any sense of urgency will lean on solutions that are scalable and available today," Goldman said.

Also boosting Nvidia's stock was positive comments from the company's CFO, Colette Kress, saying that its data center business is expected to grow and that the recent downturn in its gaming division appears to have bottomed.