Nvidia stock was rising early Friday. The chip maker looked to be getting a lift from Amazon.com, which offered a reminder of how important Nvidia's processors continue to be in the artificial-intelligence boom.
Nvidia shares were up 1% at $196.98 in premarket trading. That leaves the company on track to reclaim its title as the world's most valuable company from Apple, following the iPhone maker's sharp drop after its earnings Thursday.
Reclaiming the market-cap crown wasn't the only good news for Nvidia from Big Tech earnings. Amazon raised its capital expenditure forecast for the year to $220 billion from $200 billion and played down competition between its custom AI chips and Nvidia's processors.
"We...continue to have a deep partnership with Nvidia and will continue making AWS [Amazon Web Services] the best place to run Nvidia chips, as we have customers who will run on Nvidia for as long as we can foresee," said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in an earnings call.
The comments aren't exactly new. Jassy said last year that the online retailer-and-cloud computing company had a "very deep relationship with Nvidia" and would be buying its chips for the foreseeable future. Still, Nvidia shareholders have been braced for a less amicable relationship, amid reports Amazon is set to start selling its Trainium AI chips directly to customers.
"We do have an increasing number of customers who are interested in us providing the training and chips to them separate from our cloud," Jassy said Thursday. "We're actively having those conversations and exploring. And I expect there's a real chance we'll do that in the future."
The custom AI chip threat isn't going away for Nvidia. But at least for now, it's still the biggest in the business.
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