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While trillion-dollar Nvidia Corporation (NVDA) has been turning heads, Broadcom is no slouch as the #2 largest U.S.-based semiconductor company. SiMa.ai is hoping to displace Nvidia for generative AI at the edge with powerful and efficient chips that it says can handle a wide variety of modalities in one, \u201csoftware-centric\u201d platform. Lightmatter says it\u2019s reinventing AI infrastructure with 3-D stacked photonics chips that can dramatically increase AI cluster bandwidth and performance while lowering energy use. Etched says it\u2019s betting its whole business model on what it\u2019s calling the world\u2019s first specialized chip for transformer-based AI models.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But the semiconductor sector is growing rapidly as the world rapidly embraces artificial intelligence (AI) development and applications, for which semiconductors are critical for. Long-term debt is just $8.5 billion, which is less than a third of the $26 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the beginning of fiscal 2024. It’s also just 20% of shareholder equity of $43 billion, indicating Nvidia has plenty of dry power to access more capital. One noteworthy item on the income statement is the decrease in research and development, from 6.3% of sales in fiscal 2021 to 4.3% in fiscal 2023. By comparison, however, Taiwan Semiconductor spent 8% of revenue on R&D in 2023 and Nvidia spent more than 14% of revenue on R&D. From fiscal 2022, which ended June 30, 2022, SMCI’s gross margin was 15%, but 18% in fiscal 2023.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n