Nvidia rides AI wave to massive financial quarter
Nvidia says the booming AI market has helped it turn in record financial results as its datacenter business remains strong
Nvidia is crediting the rise of AI platforms for a quarter that saw its revenues more than double.
The chipmaker said that for the fiscal 2024 second quarter ending July 30, its revenues of $13.5bn were up 101 percent from the year-ago quarter. Net income was $6.2bn, compared to $656m in Q2 FY2023.
Earnings per share were $2.48, compared to $0.26 in the year-ago quarter, while operating expenses of $2.66bn were up just 10 percent year-over-year.
In reporting the massive quarterly returns, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang credited the big gains to the company's work in the AI space and the continued integration of AI into the enterprise computing and datacenter spaces.
"A new computing era has begun," Huang said.
"Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI."
Nvidia said that the boom in AI helped its datacenter revenues in particular. The unit made a record $10.32bn on the quarter, accounting for the lion's share of all revenues and up 141 percent from the year-ago quarter.
Returns for the gaming ($2.49bn up 11 percent), professional visualization ($379m up 28 percent) and automotive ($253 million, up 15 percent) were more modest, but still marked an increase from the year-ago-quarter.
"We had an exceptional quarter," CFO Colette Kress told analysts on a conference call discussing the quarterly numbers.
"There is tremendous demand for Nvidia accelerated computing and AI platforms."
Investors seemed happy with the record quarterly numbers, as Nvidia shares were up 3.17 percent in after-hours trading.
GPU vendors such as Nvidia have been able to reap much of the financial gain from the AI boom, as the architectures for graphics chips lend themselves well to the computational challenges of AI.
Nvidia has made big investments in the field as of late. Earlier this month the company unveiled its next-generation hardware for AI systems.
Dubbed "Grace Hopper" the chip combines both and ARM-based CPU and and Nvidia GPU core into a single platform and boasts, among other improvements, a higher memory capacity and improved bandwidth.
