The chipmaker's co-founder put into context just how much AI needs his company's tech.

Nvidia's latest earnings report shattered analysts' expectations and sent the AI chipmaker's stock surging to more than $1,000 a share for the first time, as the Taiwan-based company reported first-quarter earnings Wednesday. Nvidia reported quarterly revenue of $26 billion, easily exceeding the average estimate of analysts, pegged at $24.65 billion. The company's chips have become the infrastructural key for startups racing to build large language models (LLMS). Which makes them golden. The stock's run past $1,000 a share pushed its market value to about $2.5 trillion, compared with $745 billion at this time last year. Nvidia and its shareholders are beneficiaries of the AI explosion. On Wednesday's earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang made clear the broader industry's dependence on Nvidia's processors, as demand for AI data centers grows at a rapid clip. Basically, the company is racing to meet almost exponential demand. Huang mentioned OpenAI's flagship products, ChatGPT and GPT-4o, Google's Gemini chatbot, and other big LLM developers such as Anthropic, as feeding the influx of companies piling into the expensive and energy-intensive field of generative AI. But Nvidia is serving more than the big players. There is a crush of startups across multiple fields that depend on the company's chips, from digital design to autonomous vehicles, the CEO said. "There's also a long line of generative AI startups, some 15,000, 20,000 startups that in all different fields from multimedia to digital characters, of course, all kinds of design tool applications -- productivity applications, digital biology, the moving of the AV industry to video, so that they can train end-to-end models, to expand the operating domain of self-driving cars," Huang explained. Huang suggested that Nvidia's meteoric growth will continue. The company is banking on its Blackwell chips, unveiled in March, to lower the cost and energy consumption of building LLMs by 25 percent compared with its current crop of Hopper processors. In an announcement, Nvidia claimed Blackwell will promulgate "a new era in computing." With Blackwell's expected release in Q4, there is concern that chip demand could crater until then, which has analysts worried. Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing for a third of the global market, is delaying its order for a batch of Nvidia's Hopper processors, and will instead wait for the release of Blackwell, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. There is concern that the AWS decision could inform the decision making of other companies, creating a momentary thinning of demand, the report says. But with Nvidia's share price surging to new highs and orders still rolling in, the alarm hasn't manifested in any tangible way just yet. After all, there are 20,000 other startups that haven't changed their thinking so far.