Nvidia’s stock trajectory can hardly be described as hockey stick: The chipmaker, whose powerful graphics processing units are driving the artificial intelligence boom, hit a market capitalization of $1 trillion just a year ago. Since then, the company has tripled in value.
This explosive growth has shocked the market, the industry, and Silicon Valley.
The famous Denny’s booth. (Megan McCarty Carino/Marketplace)
You can find evidence of the Nvidia effect in some unlikely places, like a Denny’s restaurant on Berry Road in San Jose, California.
Legend has it that the company’s founders came up with the idea for the business 30 years ago over a breakfast of bottomless coffee and Grand Slams.
A plaque on the wall of a large corner booth reads, “This is the booth that launched a $2 trillion company.” One trillion is already outdated.
“Every single day, people come there and take pictures,” said server Arnulfo Alba, noting that a new, larger plaque is due to replace it — the third so far.
In just a few years, Nvidia has overtaken big names like Google and Facebook (even though many people might not be sure how to pronounce the company’s name). CEO Jensen Huang has become a kind of rock-star prophet in his trademark black leather jacket, and a job at the company is one of the hottest in Silicon Valley. But it wasn’t always this way.
“When I joined Nvidia, I never expected it to become as big as it is today,” said Charles Tsao, who started working at the company with his partner, Claire Mai, shortly after graduating in 2022, when the tech industry was in a bit of a downturn.
They’re both 25 years old, he’s an electrical engineer, she’s a software engineer, and on Tuesday they inked a deal on their first home: a $1.5 million San Francisco condominium. The top-floor unit has south-facing windows, lots of natural light, and high-end appliances.
They had planned to buy in their late 20s or early 30s, but moved up their timeline.
“We realized, ‘Wow, we’ve really boosted our savings thanks to Nvidia. Nvidia has grown so much and our stock price has basically gone up almost tenfold,'” Tsao said.
“These are recent grads. Imagine someone who’s already had a few years of experience working elsewhere,” said Spencer Xu, a real estate agent who has represented Cao, Mai and several other Nvidia employees. “They could certainly buy virtually anything, and in all fairness, many of them could do it all with cash.”
Patrick Carlisle, an analyst at Bay Area real estate firm Compass, said the explosion of wealth not just from Nvidia but the larger AI boom it is driving is rippling through the local real estate market.
“Virtually every statistic — high bids, days on market and, of course, average selling price — are all at their highest since the absolute peak of the pandemic boom,” Carlisle said.
The average selling price of a home in Santa Clara County, where San Jose is located, has hit $2 million even as mortgage rates have doubled, and sales of “luxury” homes priced above $5 million have risen more than 60% in the past year as the tech-heavy Nasdaq surged to a record high, buoyed by Nvidia.
But Silicon Valley’s current boom is different, says Nolan Church, a tech recruiting consultant at Continuum HR who has worked at Google and DoorDash.
“It’s like a tale of two cities,” he said.
For people with highly specialized skills to work in AI and other areas with significant industry investment, “if you fall into that very select few, it’s like ringing up the cash register,” he said.
But what about for everyone else? “It’s harder to get a job in tech than it’s been in a decade,” Church says.
He noted that companies continue to cut non-AI-related jobs, with “lean” being the buzzword of the day. Nvidia itself has around 30,000 employees, far fewer than the big tech companies. Apple has around 160,000 employees, and Google has 180,000.
But for others riding the AI wave, like Mai, Cao, and their pets, the future looks bright. “We have a cat and a dog, so we’ve always dreamed of making a little cat shelf,” Cao says.
“Yeah, it’s like an obstacle course for her,” Mai added.
Now that they own the home, they plan to apply their engineering talents to the project.
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