The tech giant hit a new market capitalization milestone after stellar fourth-quarter earnings driven by strong demand for artificial intelligence hardware, sending AI-related coins higher.

Tech giant Nvidia crossed the $2 trillion mark for market capitalization for the first time on Friday morning following the company’s stellar fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, driven largely by the demand for artificial intelligence chips. The news sent AI-associated altcoins higher heading into the end of the week. 

“Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang in the earnings press release. 

Nvidia, which once saw a boom from crypto miners, is now benefitting from the demand for the expensive graphics processors used in the servers that power AI models. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Nvidia reported $22.1 billion in revenue, up 265% from the same period last year. Net income totaled $12.29 billion, up 769% year-over-year. The good news continued in the first-quarter guidance, where Nvidia forecast $24 billion in sales, above the $22.17 billion expected by Wall Street analysts. 

Nvidia’s stock closed up 16% on Thursday to close at $785.38. Its price currently stands at just over $800, resulting in a market cap of $1.94 trillion, but reached as high as $824 earlier in the day. Only Apple and Microsoft have higher market caps than Nvidia.  

AI Altcoins Rise

The so-called group of AI altcoins moved higher after the Nvidia earnings. However, the coins had already been moving steadily higher before the news and started to pull back slightly on Friday.  

Worldcoin’s WLD token is up 92% in the past seven days to $8.40. Worldcoin isn’t officially an AI coin but tends to move with the group  because the biometric digital identity company was co-founded by OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Traditional AI token movers included the AGIX token of decentralized AI marketplace SingularityNET, which was up 108%, while other movers included FetchAI’sFET, up 52%, The Graph’s GRT, up 42% and Render’s RNDR, up 42%. 

Read more: Worldcoin’s WLD Token Is Pumping. But Is It All Because of OpenAI?

AI coins offer exposure to niche blockchain technologies rather than the broader market of AI technology, which would be more accessible through Nvidia or Google shares. Discussions around the use of AI in crypto will continue to be a hot topic. SwissOne Capital, a crypto-focused assets manager, discussed its AI and hardware investment strategies in a newsletter published to LinkedIn on Friday. 

“The world is awakening to the incredible potential productivity enhancements that come with the use of AI, the importance of which cannot be understated as global debt levels rise to all-time highs,” wrote SwissOne Capital. “Building AI alongside a decentralized hardware infrastructure in an open-source environment such as the global crypto landscape carries so many benefits to all participants, in particular, safety and security.”