T HE CHIP-DESIGN business is enjoying a “golden age”, declared John Hennessy and David Patterson, two gurus of computer design, earlier this month (Mr Hennessy chairs Alphabet, Google’s parent company). The shift to cloud computing, the rise of specialised computing tasks such as artificial intelligence ( AI ) and the slow death of Moore’s Law have conspired to create a growing market for “accelerator” chips designed to speed up drastically certain common types of calculation.

One of the standard-bearers for this trend is Nvidia, an American firm that makes graphics-processing units ( GPU s), customised chips designed to produce the demanding visuals in modern video games. Those chips, it turns out, are also well-suited to the sorts of calculations needed by everything from complex climate simulations to machine learning. Tweaked versions of Nvidia’s GPU s can now be found in supercomputers, data-centres and cars. Excitement about such opportunities helped propel the firm’s share price to a peak of $289 in October.

Since then its shares have tumbled. On February 14th the firm reported dire quarterly results. Revenues had fallen by 24% from the same period last year, and profits by 49%. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and boss, described it as “a turbulent close to what had been a great year”.