Nvidia's big break has been a long time coming, Jim Cramer says
- Nvidia's jump in share price on Thursday was no surprise to CNBC's Jim Cramer, who has had faith in the company's success for years.
- Cramer said CEO Jensen Huang's ability to see generative AI's potential early on is key to the company's success.
Wall Street may be shocked by Nvidia's record-breaking move on Thursday, but not CNBC's Jim Cramer.
Cramer told investors he's had faith in the software company for years — even renaming his dog Nvidia in 2017 — because of its "predictably fabulous" CEO Jensen Huang, who Cramer said has been a moat for Nvidia since its inception.
"Even in the choppiest of markets, some companies can transcend the madness in Washington," Cramer said. "[Huang] is like Andy Reid of the Kansas City Chiefs. We trust a coach like Reid to regularly pull off miracles. Why can't we trust a visionary CEO with a great track record to do the same?"
Nvidia stock soared 24% on Thursday after reporting $7.19 billion in first-quarter revenue, well above the consensus Refinitiv estimate of $6.52 billion. The company also projected $11 billion in revenue for the second quarter, beating estimates by a whopping $4 billion.
Cramer said Huang has been ahead on the value of generative artificial intelligence since the jump, buying up a valuable kind of graphics card — the H100 processor — early on.
"The big boys — think Alphabet, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta — all understand that if you use Nvidia's chips, you can speak in the vernacular of ChatGPT," Cramer said. "If you have enough Nvidia cards put together, you can enable all of this incredible artificial intelligence stuff that everybody's so excited about now. It's much more efficient than using CPUs — think what Intel makes."
Cramer said Huang showed him the power of ChatGPT when he visited Nvidia headquarters months ago, well before it saw mainstream popularity. Huang had the program create a seascape book in the style of post-impressionist painter Paul Cezanne.
"I came back and told everyone what happened," Cramer said of his visit. "No one believed me and certainly no one thought about a commercial product."
"Jensen knew it," he continued. "And had the cards ready for all who wanted them when Wall Street finally came around to generative artificial intelligence. We're now in a new age of computing, hence the biggest percentage gain for a giant company in the whole history of the market."
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Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust holds shares of Nvidia.
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