Now, that’s what you call a result—in fact, a crushing result, as Nvidia’s revenue soared by 262% in the past quarter, beating all expectations and sending the chipmaker’s shares higher in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
The company reported sales of $26.04 billion, surpassing the market's expectation of $24.65 billion and significantly higher than $7.2 billion a year ago.
It marks the third straight quarter of revenue growth in excess of 200%. A year ago, a surprise surge in revenue and earnings triggered the boom in Nvidia shares, with the first-quarter figures sending the company’s shares up 24% in after-hours trading, on their way to a 200% surge and well over $2.3 trillion in market value, making it the third most valuable company in the world.
Nvidia shares were up around 4% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the results were released—they eased 0.4% in regular dealings.
And to make the stock even more investable, it is going for a 10-for-1 split—echoing the big splits done by Apple down the years, as well as other tech stocks like Tesla, Alphabet, and Amazon.
Nvidia shares ended at $949.50 on Wednesday, so their possible value after the split will be around $100, making them far more attractive to smaller investors. Nvidia also said that it’s increasing its quarterly cash dividend from 4 cents per share to 10 cents on a pre-split basis. After the split, the dividend will be a cent a share.
Nvidia said it expected sales of $28 billion in the current June quarter. Wall Street was expecting sales of $26.61 billion. That was driven by a surge in chip sales to data centers around the world, but not China.
Nvidia said its data center category rose 427% from the year-ago quarter to $22.6 billion in revenue—no wonder there’s growing concerns about the reliability of power supply for data center demand as the AI revolution expands rapidly.
Nvidia reported net income for the quarter of $14.88 billion, compared with $2.04 billion in the first quarter of 2023.
Even as the company reports a tripling or more of its business, CEO Jensen Huang said that the company’s next-generation AI GPU, called Blackwell, would lead to more growth.
“We are poised for our next wave of growth,” Huang said in a statement. The Blackwell product is supposed to be 30 times faster than the existing chipsets.
Nvidia also highlighted strong sales of its networking parts, which are increasingly important as companies build clusters of tens of thousands of chips that need to be connected. Nvidia said that it had $3.2 billion in networking revenue, primarily its Infiniband products—over three times higher than last year’s sales.
Nvidia, before it became the top supplier to big companies building AI, was known primarily as a company making hardware for 3D gaming. The company’s gaming revenue was up 18% during the quarter to $2.65 billion.
The company also sells chips for cars and chips for advanced graphics workstations (some of its earliest product lines), which are now much smaller than its data center business. The company reported $427 million in professional visualization sales and $329 million in automotive sales.
