AI chip giant Nvidia mentioned a particular company again and again during its latest blockbuster conference call. You'll be surprised which one.

• Investors have been counting how many times executives say 'AI' on conference calls.
• That's become tedious.
• Instead, I counted how many times Nvidia mentioned different companies on its latest call.

This year, investors have been counting how many times company executives say "AI" on earnings conference calls.

It's getting a little repetitive and less useful.

So, for Nvidia's quarterly results on Wednesday, I decided to tweak the approach and count how many times the chipmaker mentioned different customers.

Tech companies are fighting to purchase as many Nvidia GPUs as possible to train and fine-tune their AI models. There aren't enough of these chips to go round, so it's important to know Nvidia's preferred customers. Counting these mentions provides a rough guide.

I reviewed the earnings conference call transcript, provided by Sentieo, part of financial data firm AlphaSense. The results are surprising.

VMware, the cloud company being acquired by Broadcom, was the clear winner with 15 mentions during the call with analysts on Wednesday.

Several of these were standard mentions that happen when an executive drones on (usually from a script) about recent customer wins and partnerships.

However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went out of his way to talk about VMware when answering AI questions from analysts. He didn't have to do this, but he did. Here's one example, where the CEO discussed large companies adopting new AI technologies.

"In order for enterprises to do it, you have to support the management system, the operating system, the security and software-defined data center approach of enterprises, and that's called VMware," he said.

When talking about how Nvidia is getting its generative AI libraries into the hands of large businesses, the CEO said these assets will be "offered as a special SKU by VMware's sales force, which is, as we all know, quite large because they reach some several hundred thousand VMware customers around the world."

No other Nvidia customer or partner came close to VMware in terms of mentions during Wednesday's conference call.

Some notable disappointments, based on this method: Apple was only mentioned once. Amazon and Google, two of the largest cloud and AI companies on earth, only got a couple of callouts each.

Here's the full list: