Within minutes of Jensen Huang and Marvell CEO Matt Murphy taking the stage at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Tuesday morning, traders were grabbing their phones. By the end of trading that day, Marvell’s stock had increased by more than 32%, reaching a record $290.79. Huang referred to Marvell as “essential” and suggested that it might be “the next trillion-dollar company”. Just one look. Basically, just one sentence. In an afternoon, a market value of eighty billion dollars was conjured.
There may not be another CEO in the world with that level of market authority at the moment. In the past, Warren Buffett could move stocks with just one recommendation. Huang is doing it with money that still seems almost unreal, on a different scale, and in a different era. His personal wealth is approximately $186 billion. Just by owning Nvidia stock, two of his executive team members became billionaires last year. The company’s market capitalization recently surpassed $5 trillion, a figure that takes some time to truly comprehend.
As part of a larger push into photonics firms that produce the networking hardware used in AI data centers, Nvidia invested $2 billion in Marvell back in March. Since the beginning of March, Huang has also made comparable investments in Lumentum and Coherent, two businesses that are constructing the connectivity infrastructure necessary for these massive computing clusters to communicate with one another. The investments are not made at random. There is a clear architectural logic: Huang seems to think that the plumbing between chips is now the bottleneck in AI computing, rather than just chips.
Beyond business strategy, Huang has a deeper connection with Taiwan. He described Taiwan as the “epicentre” of the AI revolution and last week announced plans to invest about $150 billion annually there. He was born in Tainan, in the southern part of the island. He referred to Taiwan as a strategic partner for the United States while standing in Taipei, a city he obviously feels a connection to that goes beyond quarterly earnings, pointing out the island’s own investments in American manufacturing. It is genuinely unclear if that framing will continue to hold political sway over the coming years. But as a statement of where Nvidia’s supply chain lives and breathes, it was unambiguous.
Regarding the supply side, Huang confirmed what many analysts have been closely observing: Nvidia remains limited. Even though the company has secured supply for what he described as “very, very robust growth,” demand for GPUs still exceeds what it can physically deliver. Next in line are the upcoming Vera data center CPUs, which Huang hinted may eventually surpass GPU sales. This would be a significant change considering how essential the GPU has been to Nvidia’s identity for more than ten years.
Observing all of this from the outside, it seems as though Huang is acting with a conviction that most executives spend their whole careers feigning. He personally examines each and every one of the 42,000 employees’ compensation packages and claims to always increase spending on people. During a panel discussion last year, he stated, “You take care of people, everything else takes care of itself,” with no hint of corporate rehearsal. It didn’t sound like a prepared speech; rather, it sounded like something someone genuinely believes.
It’s unclear whether Marvell truly achieves a trillion-dollar valuation, whether Nvidia’s supply chains withstand the growing geopolitical pressures surrounding Taiwan, and whether the AI boom maintains the kind of momentum that makes all these figures seem permanent. It’s still unclear if anyone other than those who currently own the stock will benefit from this degree of capital and influence concentration. However, with the throngs of people gathered outside Computex and the chips piled high in data centers spanning three continents, Jensen Huang appears to have already made up his mind about how the story will conclude.
