On Wednesday, Nvidia’s shares surpassed $1,000 for the first time in extended trading after exceeding analyst expectations for fiscal first quarter earnings.
Nvidia’s quarterly earnings release has become a benchmark for investors assessing the depth of the AI boom that has captivated markets in recent months. Its excellent results on Wednesday imply that demand for Nvidia’s AI hardware remains high, and CEO Jensen Huang stated that the company will generate revenue from its next-generation AI chip, Blackwell, later this year.
The stock increased by 7% in extended trading. Nvidia also announced that it would split its stock 10 to one. Based on the after-market movement, the shares are expected to achieve new highs on Thursday.
. Earnings per share: $6.12 adjusted, compared to $5.59 adjusted, according to LSEG average projections.
. Revenue: $26.04 billion, compared to $24.65 billion projected by LSEG.
Nvidia predicted sales of $28 billion in the current quarter. Wall Street expected earnings per share of $5.95 on $26.61 billion in sales, according to LSEG.
The chipmaker posted net income of $14.88 billion, or $5.98 per share, for the quarter ended April 28, up from $2.04 billion, or 82 cents, in the same time last year.
Nvidia’s sales have increased significantly in the previous year, with major businesses like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI investing billions of dollars in their graphics processing units. These processors are crucial for creating and deploying AI systems.
The company’s largest and most important business is data center sales, which include both AI chips and many of the extra components required to run massive AI servers.
Nvidia reported that revenue in the data center segment increased 427% year on year to $22.6 billion. Nvidia finance director Colette Kress stated in a statement that it was due to the shipment of the company’s Hopper graphics processors, which contain the H100 GPU.
“A big highlight this quarter was Meta’s announcement of Lama 3, their latest large language model, which used 24,000 H100 GPUs,” Kress remarked during an analyst call. She stated that large cloud providers account for approximately “mid-40%” of Nvidia’s data center revenue.
Even as the company reports a triple or more of its business, Huang stated that the company’s next-generation AI GPU, codenamed Blackwell, would drive further growth.
“We will see a lot of Blackwell revenue this year,” the CEO said during a conference call with analysts, adding that the new chip would be in data centers by the fourth quarter.
Nvidia also reported good sales of its networking components, which are becoming increasingly crucial as businesses develop clusters of tens of thousands of chips that must be connected. Nvidia reported $3.2 billion in networking revenue, mostly from its InfiniBand devices, more than three times greater than the previous year.
Before becoming the leading supplier to large companies developing AI, Nvidia was mostly renowned for producing 3D gaming gear. Gaming revenue increased 18% to $2.65 billion in the quarter, which Nvidia credited to robust demand.
The company also provides chips for automobiles and powerful graphics workstations, which are substantially smaller than its data center business. It reported $427 million in professional visualization sales and $329 million in automobile sales.
Nvidia said it repurchased $7.7 billion in shares and paid $98 million in dividends during the quarter. Nvidia also announced an increase in its quarterly cash dividend from 4 cents to 10 cents per share on a pre-split basis. Following the split, the dividend will be a cent per share.
