Investor says he paid “4 times earnings” for NVIDIA in 2023, underscoring the premium investors are willing to pay for AI winners

A prominent tech investor recently pointed to a striking valuation level he said his team was willing to pay for NVIDIA during the early part of the AI boom. In remarks shared via a recent interview, Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital, said that when his firm was buying NVIDIA in 2023, it was doing so at roughly four times earnings.

The comment was made in the context of a broader discussion about how quickly the market repriced leading artificial intelligence infrastructure companies. Sacerdote’s line, as published in a recent business post, was intended to convey the degree to which NVIDIA’s fundamentals and expectations were already being priced in before the most explosive phases of demand fully hit investor sentiment.

The post also frames the valuation benchmark as a reminder that the “AI winner” narrative can carry a cost. Paying a multiple of earnings is effectively a bet that future profits will grow fast enough to justify the price paid today. In that sense, the investor’s quote indicates that some professional buyers saw room for acceleration even when the company was not yet valued like a mature cash generator.

NVIDIA, whose core business centers on accelerated computing, has become a key supplier of chips and software used to train and run AI models. Those products are widely described as the backbone of modern data center AI systems, though the published post did not lay out specific technical details or model-by-model performance metrics.

Still, the valuation comment comes amid a debate that has followed NVIDIA for several years, namely whether parts of the market are extrapolating too far into the future. Recent coverage in mainstream media has highlighted how quickly investor perception can shift, including arguments that elite investors have sometimes trimmed positions or challenged the sustainability of the rally. The 24/7 Wall St. post, however, focused primarily on Sacerdote’s valuation recollection rather than on new filings, new guidance, or a fresh financial forecast.

For shareholders, one unresolved question is how that “4 times earnings” snapshot maps onto today’s fundamentals. The published post did not provide the specific earnings definition used, the exact period referenced, or whether the comparison was to trailing earnings, forward earnings, or another measure. Without those details, it is difficult to translate the quote into a precise historical valuation chart.

Investors may also want to watch how NVIDIA and other AI hardware suppliers manage the supply-and-demand balance as model sizes increase and data center buildouts continue. Even if valuation conversations turn on earnings multiples, execution still tends to determine whether investors’ expectations are ultimately met.

What to watch next is whether NVIDIA discloses any new information that could recalibrate the market’s sense of earnings durability, such as updates on supply constraints, product cadence, or the pace at which demand converts into revenue and margins. Until then, Sacerdote’s comment remains less a new datapoint than a window into how expensive NVIDIA already felt to some buyers during the early AI surge.