Nvidia CEO says AGI has arrived

0:00Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis. Good afternoon, today is Tuesday, September 8th, and I'm your host, Kim Kahn. Our top story so far. Don't look now, but your AI may already feel smarter than you, might not mind us. In video CEO Jensen Wong declared that artificial general intelligence has arrived following the release of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. He cited the rapid-for-your-evolution of models trained on more than 100,000-grace blackwell NV-link 72 chips. 400K GPUs coming online next, he added. OpenAI said Astra saturates frontier math tier 4 with a 98% score, having already helped solve long-standing open problems in mathematics. Astra also saturates Arc-AGI 3 with a 99.9% score and exploit bench with a 100% score. Separately, Wong argued that Nvidia's computing infrastructure should be viewed as an income generating asset.

1:01Nvidia Compute is fungible, durable, and highly rentable. It is a productive, revenue-generating asset, he wrote. Wong was responding to a post, noting that rental prices for Nvidia's 3-year-old, H100GPUs, had risen 22% over the past month to $3.28 an hour, even as depreciation schedules assume a chip this old only loses value. For market perspective, AI-related industries now account for more than half of the SMP-500 when combining hyperscalers, semiconductors, hardware, power, and software, according to JP Morgan asset management. Among active stocks, Intel is higher after Northland analyst Gus Richard raises rating to outperform from market-perform with a $120 price target and said the company has made material progress in its turnaround. Separately, digitimes reported that Intel is set to raise prices on its CPUs by as much as 10%. Coivent is surging after the first investigational candidate of its subsidiary, POM event, succeeded in a mid-stage trial for patients with pulmonary hypertension associated with interstitial

2:01lung disease. And IonQ is rallying after the quantum computing company raised its financial guidance following a completed acquisition of Skywater Technologies. IonQ also published the first complete end-to-end fault-tolerant resource estimate for running shores algorithm, which finds prime factors of very large numbers. In other news of note, tired chips, wired dips. PepsiCo is moving beyond the shell-stable chips soda and packaged snacks into new areas of the grocery store, including refrigerated, produce adjacent, deli, dip, and ready-to-eat meal categories. Apatite suppressing GLP-1 medicines such as wagovi and ozempic have reduced purchases of salty snacks and sweet treats, with that spending going to protein, fiber, hydration, and fresh foods. Pepsi's strategy includes extending established brands into adjacent fresh products, such as the Tastidas guacamole launch, as well as using acquisitions and ownership consolidation. And in the Wall Street research corner, memory stocks and related market exposures are starting to break above their recent downtrends after spending much of the summer consolidating

3:05according to Goldman Sachs. Lee Coppersmith, Managing Director in Goldman's Fick and Equities Division, highlighted in Micron Technology, Sandisk, the ice shares MSCI South Korea ETF, Ticker EWY, and the Round Hill Memory ETF, Ticker DRAM, as showing similar technical patterns. The charts suggest the group is beginning to emerge from its summer consolidation, all of the moves are still in their early stages. The potential breakouts come as the broader AI trade enters a more constructive setup, with a lighter investor positioning, lower implied volatility, and a series of potential catalysts, including Goldman's Communicopia and Technology Conference. You can check out some of Coppersmith's charts in our story on Seeking Alpha, that link will be at the top of show notes. That's all for today's Wall Street lunch, look for links for stories in the show notes section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at Seeking Alpha.com, slash WSP, and for a wealth of coverage on stocks and ETFs, go to Seeking Alpha.com, slash subscriptions.