Nvidia, the world’s leading chip giant and most valuable company, reported record profits in its latest quarter, propelled by unrelenting demand for AI compute power. The company's financial results, announced Wednesday, underscore a period of unprecedented growth. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated on an analyst call, “The demand for tokens in the world has gone completely exponential. We observe that even our six-year-old GPUs in the cloud are fully consumed, driving significant price increases.”
Nvidia achieved $68 billion in revenue for the most recent quarter, marking a substantial 73% increase year-over-year. The data center business significantly contributed to this performance, generating $62 billion in revenue. Within the data center segment, compute revenue, primarily from GPUs, reached $51 billion, with networking products like NVLink accounting for $11 billion. The company's full-year revenue climbed to an impressive $215 billion.
Nvidia reported no revenue from chip exports to China in the latest quarter, despite recent U.S. government export restriction adjustments. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress commented, “While the U.S. government approved small quantities of H200 products for China-based clients, no revenue has materialized yet. We cannot confirm future import approvals into China.” She further noted, “Our Chinese competitors, strengthened by recent IPOs, are advancing and possess the potential to alter the global AI industry’s structure long-term.” This statement implicitly references Moore Threads’ December IPO.
CEO Huang also discussed Nvidia’s potential $30 billion investment in OpenAI, a development widely reported. He expressed confidence in finalizing a partnership agreement, stating, “We continue to work with OpenAI toward a partnership agreement. We believe we are close.” Huang also highlighted ongoing collaborations with Anthropic, Meta, and Elon Musk’s xAI. However, Nvidia’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings on Wednesday emphasized that the investment in OpenAI is not guaranteed.
Addressing concerns about the sustainability of major tech companies' capital expenditure, Huang affirmed his belief in the imminent revenue generation from compute investments. He declared, “In this new world of AI, compute is revenue. Without compute, there is no generation of tokens. Without tokens, revenue growth is impossible.” Huang concluded, “We have reached the inflection point, generating profitable tokens that drive productivity for customers and profitability for cloud service providers.”