extra

NVIDIA’s Future Strategy: Can It Sustain Its Blue Ocean?

Published 31 Jan 2025
Reference 6964
Topic Strategy
Region Other Regions
Length 24 page(s)
Language English
Summary

The public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 marked a watershed moment in AI, transforming it from a specialized technology into a mainstream phenomenon. The sudden surge in interest in AI is directly linked to NVIDIA's bottom line and its unprecedented rise to the ranks of the most valuable companies in the world by 2024. Companies scrambling to develop and deploy their own AI models have had no place to go other than NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI solutions. Yet, NVIDIA is now faced with numerous challenges, and also an intriguing paradox: its largest customers are increasingly becoming potential competitors. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which buy huge quantities of NVIDIA chips, are developing their own AI accelerators. On top, there is the recent release of DeepSeek. This case discusses how NVIDIA succeeded in creating a new market space for AI data centers and whether it can continue to stay on a sustainable, high-growth path, in light of the emerging challenges. Can it continue to swim in a blue ocean devoid of any competition, or will the sharks lurking nearby soon turn the ocean bloody red? A salient feature of this case is that, unlike most other cases that focus on a decision that happened years ago, this case deals with a contemporary business issue – one that is on track to transform our society in a significant way.

Teaching objectives

1. Understand the challenges NVIDIA is facing. 2. Show that strategy is more than creating value for customers. A successful market-creating blue ocean strategy must create value for buyers and profit for the company while motivating the people working for or with it to execute the strategy. 3. Illustrate why alignment of the three strategy propositions-- value, profit, and people propositions-- is key for sustaining success. When the three are aligned, how key factors from each proposition can support and reinforce the other two propositions to build a formidable barrier to imitation. And how misalignment of the three strategy propositions is unlikely to produce a sustainable, high-performing strategy. 4. Illustrate that a corporation’s market value hinges upon not only its current performance but also the future growth prospects of its portfolio of businesses. A corporation should strategize and manage its portfolio of businesses to balance its current profit/cash flow and future growth.

Keywords
  • Strategy
  • Blue Ocean Strategy
  • Innovation
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Semiconductors
  • NVIDIA
  • Generative AI
  • Sustainable growth
  • AMD
  • Intel
  • AWS
  • data centers
  • DeepSeek
  • SDG9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
  • Q12025