NVIDIA Crushes Earnings On Monster AI Chip Demand And Big Gains In Gaming
NVIDIA has found its golden goose in AI chip design, which contributed heavily to another massive spike in revenue during the company's third quarter of fiscal 2024—it tripled year-over-year to $18.12 billion. That's also a sizable 34% gain from the previous quarter and a new quarterly revenue record, and it led to a huge profit of more than $10 billion.
At this point, NVIDIA might as well be printing money. Instead, it's printing chip designs, which is proving nearly as lucrative. By and large those chips end up in the data center, a category that posted record revenue of $14.5 billion for the quarter, which is a 41% sequential gain and an astounding 279% jump from the same quarter a year ago. The data center is NVIDIA's bigger earner these days and it's not even close.
"Our strong growth reflects the broad industry platform transition from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Large language model startups, consumer internet companies and global cloud service providers were the first movers, and the next waves are starting to build. Nations and regional CSPs are investing in AI clouds to serve local demand, enterprise software companies are adding AI copilots and assistants to their platforms, and enterprises are creating custom AI to automate the world’s largest industries."
NVIDIA's bet on generative AI hardware and software solutions is paying off a big way, to say the least. That said, gaming solutions continue to bring in billions of dollars every quarter. To be more precise, gaming contributed around $2.86 billion for the quarter, compared to $2.49 billion in the previous quarter and $2.24 billion a year ago.
Looking at NVIDIA's business more broadly, every single category saw quarterly revenue growth, it's just a matter of by how much. Auto's rise was the least significant at just 3%, though it still raked in $261 million. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's professional visualization business rose 9.8% to $416 million, while its OEM and other category jumped 10.6% to $73 million.
"NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, networking, AI foundry services and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software are all growth engines in full throttle. The era of generative AI is taking off," Huang added.
The addition of CPUs to the mix with its recently-upgraded Grace Hopper Superchip is relatively new. However, NVIDIA is making quick work of expanding its CPU silicon. During a conference call to discuss its latest earnings report, Huang said NVIDIA is "on a very, very fast ramp with our first data center CPU to a multi-billion dollar product line."
Looking ahead, NVIDIA expects its Q4 revenue to hit $20 billion, plus or minus 2%.
