Nvidia earnings show skyrocketing profits and revenue amid AI boom

Nvidia, the king of chips that power artificial intelligence, released quarterly financial results on Wednesday that reinforced how the company has become one of the biggest winners from the artificial intelligence boom, and said demand for its products would drive a continuous sales growth.

The Silicon Valley chipmaker has seen an extraordinary surge over the past 18 months, driven by demand for its expensive, specialized semiconductors, which are used to train popular artificial intelligence services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. Nvidia has become known as one of the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks, which along with others like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have helped boost the stock market.

Nvidia’s valuation has risen more than 40 percent to $1.7 trillion since the beginning of the year, making it one of the most valuable public companies in the world. Last week, the company briefly eclipsed the market values ​​of Amazon and Alphabet before falling back to fifth place as the most valuable tech company. Its stock market gains are largely the result of repeatedly exceeding analysts’ growth expectations, a feat that is becoming more difficult as they continue to raise their predictions.

On Wednesday, Nvidia reported that revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter tripled from a year earlier to $22.1 billion, while profits jumped nearly ninefold to $12.3 billion. Revenue was well above the $20 billion the company predicted in November and above Wall Street estimates of $20.4 billion.

Nvidia predicted revenue in the current quarter would total about $24 billion, also more than triple the prior-year period and more than analysts’ average forecast of $22 billion.

Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, argues that a momentous shift to upgrade data centers with chips needed to train powerful AI models is still in its early stages. That will require spending roughly $2 trillion to equip all buildings and computers to use chips like Nvidia’s, he predicts.

“Accelerated computing and generative AI have reached the tipping point,” Huang said in a press release. “Demand is increasing around the world in companies, industries and countries.”

In an interview later Wednesday, Huang said the company had much more growth ahead. “We’re a year away from generative AI,” he said.“I guess we are literally in the first year of a 10-year cycle of spreading this technology across industries.”

Some analysts had predicted a sell-off after Nvidia’s announcement, a reaction to how high its share price has risen. But shares rose more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.

“Despite concerns about its high valuation, Nvidia’s unparalleled AI-related intellectual property, rooted in decades of visionary investments, sets it apart in a league of its own,” wrote Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, in a report from investigation before the company reported.

One factor driving Nvidia’s latest revenue growth is the ability of the company’s manufacturing partners, led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, to ramp up supplies of Nvidia’s flagship AI chip, which has prices ranging from $15,000. and $40,000.

Huang said on a conference call with analysts on Wednesday that the availability of those chips had improved significantly, but noted that the company would soon introduce new products that would once again be in short supply.

“Every time we have new products, it goes from zero to a very large number, and that can’t be done overnight,” he said during the call.

But giant cloud computing companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are designing their own AI chips to use in addition to Nvidia’s, and rival chip makers continue to introduce their own AI products.

Intel, which has long dominated the standard microprocessor chip industry but lags in AI, gathered a host of partners and potential customers in Silicon Valley on Wednesday to discuss its plans to offer manufacturing services, which could boost industry’s ability to build AI chips. Among those in attendance was Sam Altman, who relies heavily on Nvidia chips as CEO of OpenAI.

“Intel was once the evil Borg of the industry,” said Daniel Newman, chief executive of Futurum Research, which follows the semiconductor industry. Now, he said, “companies are banding together to make sure Nvidia doesn’t become much more powerful.”

The Biden administration has raised another set of obstacles for Nvidia and other American chipmakers, imposing restrictions on their chip sales in China. Nvidia has responded by selling less powerful versions of some products on the market.

Still, the company said Wednesday that its sales to China had fallen to a mid-single percentage of its data center chip revenue, from 19 percent in its fiscal 2023 year.

Meanwhile, some experts worry that the global rollout of the company’s expensive, power-hungry chips will strain countries’ power grids and budgets.

Mr. Huang addressed some of those concerns in February at the World Government Summit in Dubai. He said Nvidia’s chips were cheap and efficient compared to using slower standard microprocessors to do the same job, and that much faster chips were on the way, some of which the company is expected to unveil in March.

“Assuming that computers never get faster, you could conclude that we need 14 different planets, three different galaxies and four more suns to power all of this,” Huang said. “But obviously computer architecture continues to advance.”