- Nvidia reported revenue of $7.19 billion in the first quarter of FY24 compared to the market estimate of $6.52 billion.
- The company’s overall profit jumped by 26% year-over-year to $2.04 billion.
Shares of US semiconductor giant NVIDIA jumped by nearly 26%, raising its market capitalisation by $184 billion on Wednesday after the company reported a stronger-than-expected forecast for the quarter that ends in July.
The chipmaker said that it expected sales to reach $11 billion in the current quarter which is 50% more than Wall Street’s estimate of $7.2 billion.
Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang said that the computer industry was going through two simultaneous transitions — accelerated computing and generative AI, resulting in the replacement of a trillion dollars worth of installed global data centre infrastructure. He said that the company was seeing a surge in demand for generative AI chips for data centres.
“Our entire data centre family of products — H100, Grace CPU, Grace Hopper Superchip, NVLink, Quantum 400 InfiniBand and BlueField-3 DPU — is in production. We are significantly increasing our supply to meet surging demand for them,” he said.
The H100, designed to handle the demands of large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, was launched this year.
Numbers game
The chip manufacturing behemoth reported revenue of $7.19 billion in the first quarter of FY24 compared to the market estimate of $6.52 billion. The company’s profit jumped by 26% year-over-year to $2.04 billion, but overall sales fell 13% from $8.29 billion a year ago.
While the data centre group reported a 14% y-o-y increase in sales to $4.28 billion, the gaming division, which includes the company’s graphics cards for PC sales, reported a 38% drop in revenue to $2.24 billion. The company attributed the decline in revenue to the slower macroeconomic environment and the ramp-up of the company’s latest graphics processing units (GPU) for gaming.
Sales for Nvidia’s automotive division which includes chips and software to develop self-driving cars, grew 114% year over year but remained small at under $300 million in sales for the quarter. The net income for the quarter was $2.04 billion, or 82 cents a share, compared with $1.62 billion, or 64 cents, during the year-earlier period.
