Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Nvidia used to be a gaming GPU company, but the company's value has absolutely skyrocketed thanks to the AI craze and a GPU's value in accelerating AI workloads. A few purpose-built chips later, like the H100 Tensor Core GPU (with a price of $25,000-$40,000!) and A100, and Nvidia's stock is up 50 percent this year. At press time, Nvidia's market cap is now $1.8 trillion, beating Amazon ($1.76 trillion) and Google's parent company, Alphabet ($1.77 trillion), to become the world's fourth most valuable company.

How much further can Nvidia's blazing stock rally go? Next up on the ' highest market cap ' list is Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, at $2.0 trillion; then Apple, at $2.8 trillion; and another company riding the AI wave, Microsoft, at $3 trillion.

Nvidia's next earnings report is February 21. The last one was for Q3 2023 , showing that the company is basically selling every AI chip it can make. Revenue was up 206 percent from the same quarter last year, and of the company's $18.12 billion in revenue, $14.51 billion was generated by its AI/data center division. Q4 will probably be another record-setting quarter for the company, and coming up in Q2 2024, Nvidia will launch its next-gen AI chip, the HGX H200 Tensor Core GPU. A TrendForce estimate puts Nvidia's AI server market share at 60–70 percent.

Enlarge (credit: Nvidia / Benj Edwards)

On Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that every country should control its own AI infrastructure so it can protect its culture, Reuters reports . He called this concept "Sovereign AI," which an Nvidia blog post defined as each country owning "the production of their own intelligence."

Huang made the announcement in a discussion with UAE's Minister of AI, Omar Al Olama, during the World Governments Summit in Dubai. "It codifies your culture, your society’s intelligence, your common sense, your history—you own your own data," Huang told Al Olama.

The World Governments Summit organization defines itself as "a global, neutral, non-profit organization dedicated to shaping the future of governments." Its annual event attracts over 4,000 delegates from 150 countries, according to Nvidia. It's hosted in the United Arab Emirates , a collection of absolute monarchies with no democratically elected institutions.

Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks before signing the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. (credit: Chip Somodevilla / Staff | Getty Images North America )

The Biden administration announced investments Friday totaling more than $5 billion in semiconductor research and development intended to re-establish the US as a global leader manufacturing the "next generation of semiconductor technologies."

Through sizeable investments, the US will "advance US leadership in semiconductor R&D, cut down on the time and cost of commercializing new technologies, bolster US national security, and connect and support workers in securing good semiconductor jobs," a White House press release said.

Currently, the US produces "less than 10 percent" of the global chips supply and "none of the most advanced chips," the White House said. But investing in programs like the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC)—considered the "centerpiece" of the CHIPS and Science Act's four R&D programs—and training a talented workforce could significantly increase US production of semiconductors that the Biden administration described as the "backbone of the modern economy."

• 

  PNY's version of the RTX 4080 Super. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Nvidia's new RTX 4080 Super is technically faster than the regular 4080 , but, by an order of magnitude, the most interesting thing about it is that, at its launch price of $999, it's $200 cheaper than the original 4080. I am going to write more after this sentence, but that's basically the review. You're welcome to keep reading, and I would appreciate it if you would, but truly there is only one number you need to know, and it is "$200."

All three of these Super cards—the 4070 Super , the 4070 Ti Super , and now the 4080 Super—are mild correctives for a GPU generation that has been more expensive than its predecessors and also, in relative terms, less of a performance boost. The difference is that where the 4070 Super and 4070 Ti Super try to earn their existing price tags by boosting performance, the 4080 Super focuses on lowering its price to be more in line with where its competition is.

Yes, it's marginally faster than the original 4080, but its best feature is a price drop from $1,199 to a still high, but more reasonable, $999. What it doesn't do is attempt to close the gap between the 4080 series and the 4090, a card that still significantly outruns any other consumer GPU that AMD or Nvidia offers. But if you have a big budget, want something that's still head-and-shoulders above the entire RTX 30-series, and don't want to deal with the 4090's currently inflated pricing, the 4080 Super is much more appealing than the regular 4080, even if it is basically the same GPU with a new name.

• 

  Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

Of all of Nvidia's current-generation GPU launches, there hasn't been one that's been quite as weird as the case of the "GeForce RTX 4080 12GB."

It was the third and slowest of the graphics cards Nvidia announced at the onset of the RTX 40-series, and at first blush it just sounded like a version of the second-fastest RTX 4080 but with less RAM. But spec sheets and Nvidia's own performance estimates showed that there was a deceptively huge performance gap between the two 4080 cards, enough that calling them both "4080" could have lead to confusion and upset among buyers.

Taking the hint, Nvidia reversed course, " unlaunching " the 4080 12GB because it was "not named right." This decision came late enough in the launch process that a whole bunch of existing packaging had to be trashed and that new BIOSes with new GPU named needed to be flashed to the cards before they could be sold.