Xilinx – Investing in FPGAs For AI Hardware

The year was 2012 and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) had just become the world’s most valuable company reaching a market cap of over 600 billion. If exactly 5 years ago you bought shares in Apple, you’d be up about +103% on your investment vs a NASDAQ return of +109%. If in fact you decided to invest in NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) instead, you’d be up over +1,000% on that investment today. You’d be even happier this morning to see that Softbank (TYO:9984) has been quietly amassing a position in NVIDIA of $4 billion making them the 4th largest shareholder.

We recently wrote about NVIDIA’s market share of GPUs vs their biggest competitor, AMD (NASDAQ:AMD). A number of nerds critics chastised us for being so blunt about our findings, but our conclusion was that AMD poses little threat to NVIDA dominating the market for GPUs as AI hardware. We then took a look at 12 startups building new AI chips and noted that while some of these startups looked exciting, they would have an incredibly difficult time displacing NVIDIA