Lay’s, Doritos, Ruffles, Fritos … Humans are addicted to chips. It turns out the market is too. For the first half of this week, the stock market (which is increasingly driven by a decreasing number of companies) was sliding as investors worried about the earnings of one company: Nvidia. At the risk of getting overly technical, Nvidia makes the stuff the powers the things that make AI do whatever it’s doing that makes you go wow and uh oh at the same time. The market was worried that the leading indicator of AI growth had gotten ahead of itself after many quarters of incredible growth. Maybe, the market seemed to wonder, we’d built up another stock market bubble. Then Nvidia’s earnings came out. If this is a bubble, it’s one filled with cash. And the same can be said for for the pockets of investors who had pushed all their chips on the Nvidia table as the stock just realized the biggest single day marketcap gain in history—which came about in part because of the selling earlier in the week. What can I say? When it comes to chips, buy the dip. But this isn’t just a story about a stock price. It’s a story about how AI is driving the technology industry, which means it will increasingly be a driving factor in our lives. According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, “Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations.” (I would have said that demand has hit a chipping point, but I write a newsletter with no revenue model…)

+ Fortune: “Customer demand for Nvidia chips is so far above supply that CEO Jensen Huang had to discuss how ‘fairly’ the company decides who can buy them.”

+ It’s not just Nvidia. Chips run the world. AI needs more chip power. And there’s an international battle to get the edge. Nvidia’s boom, Intel’s big plans show how AI has turbocharged chipmaking.