Feb 22 Reuters Chip designer Nvidia Corp forecast firstquarter revenue above Wall Street estimates on Wednesday as its CEO said use of its chips to power artificial intelligence AI services like chatbots had gone through the roof in the last 60 days.

The sales outlook drove Nvidia39;s shares up 8 in extended trading. The world39;s largest supplier of chips used in data centers for training AI has become a key hardware supplier for large tech companies such as Microsoft Corp that are building services like chatpowered search engines.

AI is one of the few areas where tech companies are still spending even as the sector slashes jobs. Microsoft and Alphabet Inc, for example, are both laying off thousands of employees but are also locked in a race to imbue their search engines with chatbot technology despite the fact that doing so is likely to add billions of dollars to their operating costs.

Analysts believe that Nvidia, more than any other company, is best positioned to benefit from such increased costs as it dominates roughly 80 of the market for graphics processing units, or GPUs, used to speed up AI work.

On a conference call with investors, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang announced a new service in which Nvidia will directly offer its cloud computing service for companies to rent all of its technologies to develop their own generative AI services that can create text, images and other forms of data.

AI is still not deployed in enterprises broadly, but we…