AWS Exec: Demand for Nvidia Chips Will Stay High

Nvidia’s rapid climb to become the third most valuable company has drawn comparisons to Cisco, whose success in selling routers during the dot-com boom briefly made it the world’s most valuable public company in 2000. But Matt Wood, a vice president of artificial intelligence products at Amazon Web Services which is among Nvidia’s biggest customers, scoffs at the comparison.

That “doesn’t check out for me,” said Wood, citing Nvidia’s inventiveness and the “enormous gains” it is delivering to customers. Cisco’s ascendancy proved short lived and in recent years the company’s business has stagnated.

And while some industry figures, including Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, have said they expect supply constraints for Nvidia AI chips, known as graphics processing units, to ease in the next year—causing prices to drop—Wood said he isn’t so sure of that either.