NVIDIA – The Full-Stack Maestro

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome back to another episode of AI to ROI, the Big Story Edition. I'm Ray Rike, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and joining me as always is my co-host, Peter Buchanan.

**Peter Buchanan** (0:20)
I'm Peter Buchanan. I'm the managing partner of NewPlan, and Ray, we're diving into something really extraordinary today. Nvidia's complete transformation from a GPU maker to a full stack AI platform company in six months.

**Ray Rike** (0:37)
Okay. Hey, Peter, as you know, I've always been in software. I'm a business and financial metrics guy.
So I may need you to help bell me out when I don't understand exactly some of their chips and technology. Okay?

**Peter Buchanan** (0:52)
I'll do that.

**Ray Rike** (0:53)
The good news is this isn't a technology story per se. It's not just another earning story. But since we published our deep dive on Nvidia and the newsletter back in October, the company has moved faster and further than I think anyone could have anticipated. And by the way, we're going to talk about the financials later on.
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Now on to the show.

**Peter Buchanan** (2:23)
Yeah, they're bonkers.

**Ray Rike** (2:24)
In fact, in the spoiler alert that we always do, we said that Nvidia was the kind of AI maestro, right?

**Peter Buchanan** (2:33)
Yeah.

**Ray Rike** (2:33)
Well, it's gone beyond just orchestrating and conducting that orchestra, it's rewriting the music. And I'll tell you what, I think they may be building the entire AI concert hall.
But hey, let's start with what we talked about back in October. Man, five months ago. Tell us, Peter.

**Peter Buchanan** (2:53)
So we started, let's start. Yeah, we used that as the baseline. So on October 4th of 2025, we wrote an article that concluded that Nvidia was the maestro of the AI economy. And we had three elements to our argument. The first is the AI market in its high growth form couldn't exist that Nvidia because there's no other place to get the high performance chips.
That the products also were capacity constrained. So and there were no alternatives. So everybody had to go to them. And then they were actively building an ecosystem by investing in companies that would then use their platform. So there was a big debate at the time about circular deals with hyperscalers and some of the other up to SAC application companies that sort of guaranteed that Nvidia was going to make money. But frankly, they were going to make it anyway, because there was nowhere else for people to go.

**Ray Rike** (3:49)
Yeah. But back then, the poster child of that was the $100 billion Nvidia and OpenAI partnership. Now, there were milestones and it was time based. But to me, that was the playbook in action, right? Convert cash, which they have a lot of cash. And we'll find out they've got almost 45% free cash flow margins. So, they invested that free cash flow into long-term customer relationships. They wanted to really broaden and cement their place in the entire AI ecosystem and basically compound the velocity of that flywheel. How's that held up?

**Peter Buchanan** (4:26)
Yeah. So, that thesis held up. I mean, what do you think?

**Ray Rike** (4:30)
You tell me.
Well, maybe I should tell you. OK. Here, I'll start it.

**Peter Buchanan** (4:34)
OK? Yeah.

**Ray Rike** (4:35)
You know, The Economist is always a good publication to quote, and they described Jensen's vision perfectly. Transform Nvidia into a foundational company on which the rest of the AI economy rests. This means not just selling chips, but to me, the most interesting move is them bundling software into this complete AI stack and embedding Nvidia's technology across the industry. In fact, Nvidia is so much more than a chip company today. And I was trying to think of parallels in the history of technology, Peter. And the only company I think was ever close to what Nvidia is here in 2026 was what IBM was in the 1960s through 80s. And most people listening to this podcast, if you're not a historian of technology industry, you may not know, but IBM dominated the technology industry for over 20 years.