Actions of Nvidia (NVDA 1.73%) are up 170% in 2024 (at the time of writing). This monster year follows an even bigger 2023, which saw the stock rise nearly 240%. In total, the actions of artificial intelligence (AI) Heavyweights are up more than 900% since their late 2022 low. Given this incredible performance, is it too late to buy?

Far from it. There are all sorts of reasons I could give as to why Nvidia will continue to beat the marketbut for my money, the main reason is simple: demand remains incredibly strong for its chips.

Blackwell arrives

I would be concerned if there were signs that demand for the company’s graphics processing units was waning, but that’s really not the case. Demand for its current Hopper chips is still robust; the company expects sales to continue into next year, even as it prepares to launch Hopper’s successor, Blackwell.

And demand for the new chips is “crazy,” according to CEO Jensen Huang. So much so that despite efforts to increase capacity by building a new specific factory in Blackwell in Mexico, the next generation chips would be sold out until the end of 2025.

The tech industry’s top CEOs are pressuring Nvidia to get their hands on enough Blackwell chips to satisfy their data center building programs. Elon Musk wants to buy a huge amount of chips to expand his flagship xAI supercomputer.

Its aptly named Colossus is already considered the largest AI computer in the world with 100,000 Hopper tokens. Musk wants to expand that to 1 million chips, most of which would be Blackwells. Whether this will be possible – or at least when – remains to be seen, but we hope it illustrates the scale of the demand.

Musk is not alone. He may have been the most outspoken publicly, but in their latest earnings calls, management from Nvidia’s biggest customers, like Meta And Alphabet — have made it clear that they intend to keep the money flowing to maintain their enormous capital expenditure for data centers.