Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang was bullish on the company's third-quarter results. Looking at the company's performance, there may be a reason to do so.
Nvidia reported third-quarter revenue of $57 billion, an increase of 62% compared to the same period last year. On a GAAP basis, the company's net income was $32 billion, an increase of 65% year over year. Both sales and profit results exceeded Wall Street expectations.
Looking at the earnings picture, we can see that the company is growing rapidly, mainly thanks to its data center business. Nvidia's data center business generated a record $51.2 billion in revenue, up 25% sequentially and 66% year-over-year. The remaining $5.8 billion in revenue was $4.2 billion from Nvidia's gaming business, followed by professional visualization and automotive sales.
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in a statement to shareholders that the company's data center business has been driven by compute acceleration, powerful AI models and agent applications. During the company's third-quarter conference call, Kress said the company announced AI factory and infrastructure projects worth a total of 5 million GPUs during the quarter.
“This demand spans all markets, CSPs, sovereigns, modern builders and supercomputing centers, and includes multiple groundbreaking construction projects,” Kress said.
Blackwell Ultra, a GPU announced in March and available in several configurations, has done particularly well and is now the leader within the company. The company said previous versions of the Blackwell architecture continued to be in high demand.
Huang said sales of the company's Blackwell GPU chips are “off the charts.”
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“Blackwell's sales are off the charts and cloud GPUs are selling out,” Huang said in the company's third-quarter earnings report. “Computing demands continue to accelerate and compound across training and inference, each growing exponentially. We are in a virtuous circle for AI. The AI ecosystem is expanding rapidly, with more new foundational modelers, more AI startups, more industries, and more countries. AI is going everywhere and doing everything at once.”
Kress pointed out that the company shipped 50 million units of its H20, a data center GPU designed for generative AI and high-performance computing, which was a disappointing result as it was unable to sell it to China.
“Due to geopolitical issues and intensifying competition in the Chinese market, large-scale orders were not realized during the quarter,” Kress said at the earnings conference. “While we are disappointed in our inability to ship more competitive data center computing products to China, we remain committed to continued engagement with the U.S. and Chinese governments and continue to advocate for America's ability to compete around the world.”
Importantly, NVIDIA is forecasting further growth with fourth-quarter revenue of $65 billion, contributing to the stock's more than 4% rise in after-hours trading.
The result, at least in Hwang's view, is to forget about bubbles and just have growth.
“There's been a lot of talk about the AI bubble,” Jensen said on the company's earnings call. “From our perspective, we see something completely different.”