Nvidia's latest quarter beat expectations and its outlook points to much stronger sales ahead, good news for chip investors across the US, Taiwan and South Korea.

• Revenue doubled from a year ago and the next quarter is guided even higher, pushing the stock up after hours despite a weak day for US markets on hot inflation data.
• Data centers drove more than nine-tenths of sales, a sign AI spending is real demand rather than a short-lived bubble.
• Nvidia's purchase commitments to suppliers ballooned, mostly for memory chips, showing key parts are in short supply.
• Taiwan gains through advanced chipmaking, packaging and server assembly; South Korea gains because SK Hynix and Samsung dominate the high-speed memory Nvidia needs.
• Big cloud spenders like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta keep expanding budgets, and demand is now spreading to startups and industrial customers.

Outlook: The AI race stays a chip race, and spreading money across US, Taiwanese and Korean suppliers is the favored way to ride it while limiting single-market risk.