Nvidia holdings disclosure sends shares of small-cap AI companies soaring

With the exception of Arm, whose market value recently topped $130 billion, shares of Nvidia-backed companies rose Thursday after filing a 13F filing, the form that must be filed by institutional investment managers overseeing at least $100 million in assets.

But none of these investments will be surprising to anyone who has taken the time to sift through old news reports and files. The AI ​​mania is going through a phase of irrational exuberance, and investors are pounced on anything and everything in the space.

No stock is hotter than Nvidia, which surpassed Amazon by market cap on Tuesday and then Alphabet on Wednesday to become the third-most valuable company in the United States, behind only Apple and Microsoft. Nvidia shares have risen more than 200% over the past 12 months on seemingly unlimited demand for its AI chips, which support powerful AI models from Google, Amazon, OpenAI and others.

Shares of SoundHound, which uses artificial intelligence for speech processing and voice recognition, jumped 68% on Thursday, after Nvidia disclosed a stake of $3.7 million at the time of filing. Nvidia Invested in SoundHound Back in 2017 as part of a $75 million investment round.

SoundHound went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2022, and Nvidia was named as a strategic investor in its venture. Power point.

Nano-X uses artificial intelligence in medical imaging. Nvidia's disclosure of a $380,000 investment in the company sent the stock soaring 59% on Thursday. Nvidia's involvement goes back years Project investment in Zebra Medical, an Israeli medical imaging startup. Nano X acquired Zebra in 2021.

Shares of TuSimple, the independent trucking company, rose 40% Thursday after Nvidia's $3 million stake was disclosed. The stock rise comes after a month for the company Announce The company plans to delist from the Nasdaq due to a “significant shift in capital markets” since its IPO in 2021. TuSimple debuted at $40 a share and now trades for about 50 cents.

“Accordingly, the Special Committee has determined that the benefits of remaining a publicly traded company no longer justify the costs,” TuSimple said in a Jan. 17 statement. “The company is undergoing a transformation that the company believes it can navigate better as a privately held company than as a publicly traded company.”

Nvidia Invested in TuSimple In 2017, four years before the IPO.

Nvidia recently acquired its stake in biotech company Recursion. Like TuSimple, recursion It goes public in 2021, but Nvidia bought it two years later through a so-called private investment in public equity (PIPE). Nvidia bought $50 million worth of stock in 2023 It now has $76 million invested, according to its filing.

Recursion shares rose 15% on Thursday.

Nvidia's financials will be on full display next week, when the company reports its quarterly earnings. Analysts expect year-over-year revenue growth of more than 200% to more than $20 billion.

The company's latest investments are likely to be far more significant than its previous bets, revealed late Wednesday, because they are at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom. In recent years, Nvidia has backed AI startups including Cohere, Hugging Face, CoreWeave, and Perplexity.

“AI is changing the way consumers access information,” Jonathan Cohen, vice president of applied research at Nvidia, said in Perplexity. advertisement From a $73.6 million funding round last month, “Perplexity’s world-class team is building a trusted AI-powered research platform that will help drive this transformation forward.”

He watches: Perplexity AI aims to rival Google