Record highs, record closes for the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ as Nvidia hits a record of its own.

Another day, another record for Nvidia.

If you look at when ChatGPT was first announced, that was the fall of 2022.

So it's a really, really fast rise in a very short amount of time.

Apple took 1,793 days or less than five years to go from a $1 trillion company to a $3 trillion company.

Nvidia says, hold my beer.

They did the same thing, one to three trillion in less than a year.

When ChatGPT came out, Nvidia was worth less than a trillion dollars.

Then six months, seven months after ChatGPT in May of 2023, it hit $1 trillion.

And at the time, people were starting to realize that if AI was a gold rush, Nvidia was the one making the shovels.

The Nvidia craze just never stopped.

It hit two trillion in February of this year.

It's been an absolute incredible run, but it has been absolutely backstopped by the fundamentals.

Six, eight months later, its value has already doubled.

And then from $2 trillion, it only took just over three months for it to hit $3 trillion.

It's really tough to get to three trillion.

That said though, if you're designing the perfect momentum company from scratch, Nvidia would be it.

They're making a lot of money for each one of the chips they sell.

These are very profitable devices.

We see the orders for GB200.

We see the orders for the B200.

Nothing is slowing down.

There may not be a chip that's really competing or challenging its flagship H100 or the forthcoming GB200, but the competition is coming.

Intel talked about its AI accelerator and said it was going to be much, much cheaper than Nvidia's.

Now, there may still be performance questions and that kind of thing, but if it's that much cheaper, everyone's going to take a look at it because it can save them a lot of money.

And it's not just Intel.

AMD is coming with a GPU.

All of the biggest customers, which include Microsoft and Meta and Amazon, they're developing their own chips too.

Everyone is looking to save money because these Nvidia chips are quite pricey.

Six months ago, you'd sometimes hear folks say, "Well, I like AMD as a comeback kid and they're going to be kind of second on the wave of the AI crest that Nvidia started."

And I think what we've seen, especially in the last couple of weeks, when you've looked at HPE's results or Dell's results,

Nvidia is really just sucking up the profits and the gross margins in this space to the tune of something like 75%.

And others are happy to come in, come along for the ride, hoping to sell other services afterwards, but they are getting the dominant share.

So don't mess with success.

So competition is definitely the biggest challenge for Nvidia.

Not only do you have its customers and its rivals, you also have hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions going into venture investment for new companies that are doing nothing but aiming at Nvidia's crown.

But here's what I think about the competition.

I think Nvidia will stay ahead.

It's a very, very big pie.

AMD is a well-regarded company.

They will get a slice, but Nvidia will still stay a top dog.

Intel is a company, at least on the manufacturing side, that has been the gang that hasn't been able to shoot straight for about 20 years now, Joe.

And so I think that they will make a comeback in PC-oriented CPUs, but all their claims about AI, maybe they get there, but I will believe it when I see it.

To keep everything in perspective,

Nvidia's sales, even though they've tripled in the last year, are still far, far short of Microsoft's annual sales and Apple's annual sales.

And they have really nice, durable margins, too.

It's hard to see Nvidia replacing Apple or Microsoft in the technology ecosystem, but could it take the crown of most valuable US company?

Yeah, I think that's possible.