In the public consciousness, OpenAI is the obvious winner of the meteoric AI boom. For a runner-up, you might consider Midjourney or Anthropic’s Claude, a high-performing competitor to ChatGPT. Whether any of those players will figure out how to effectively monetize that buzz is widely debated. But in the meantime, someone has to supply the hardware to run all that viral generative AI — and for now, that’s where the money is. Enter the Nvidia Corporation, a newly trillion dollar company that’s making so much dough off its gangbusters AI chips that its revenue has more than doubled from last year, quickly becoming the undisputed backbone of the AI industry. Per its latest quarterly earnings report, Nvidia’s revenue now sits at a hefty $13.5 billion, and the spike in its profits is even more unbelievable: a nine times increase in net income year-over-year, shooting up to $6.2 billion. In other words, there’s no question that AI is a gold rush — and regardless of whether any of the prospectors hit pay dirt, it’s currently Nvidia that’s selling shovels. That’s a surprising twist. If you’ve heard of Nvidia in years past, it was more than likely for its gaming hardware. Now, selling parts to PC gamers accounts for only a modest portion of its colossal revenue. That reality has been quietly shifting for a while. Before AI took the tech sector by storm over the past year, the first hint of Nvidia’s strange new trajectory was arguably cryptocurrency. As Bitcoin and its ilk…If AI Is a Gold Rush, Nvidia Is Selling Shovels