Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang presents the Nvidia Blackwell platform at an occasion forward of the Computex discussion board, in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 2, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Nvidia reported fourth-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday that beat Wall Road expectations. The corporate additionally supplied sturdy steering for the present quarter.
The corporate’s report and steering indicators that the chipmaker is assured it is going to be in a position to proceed its historic run of progress pushed by synthetic intelligence effectively into 2025. Shares had been flat in prolonged buying and selling.
This is how the corporate did, in contrast with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
- Income: $39.33 billion vs. $38.05 billion estimated
- Earnings per share: $0.89 adjusted vs. $0.84 estimated
Nvidia stated it anticipated about $43 billion in first-quarter income, plus or minus 2%, versus $41.78 billion anticipated per LSEG estimates. The primary-quarter forecast implies year-to-year progress of about 65% from a yr earlier, a slowdown from 262% annual progress in the identical interval a yr prior.
Chief Monetary Officer Colette Kress stated the corporate expects “a big ramp” of gross sales of Blackwell, its next-generation AI chip, within the first quarter.
Web revenue through the quarter rose to $22.09 billion, or 89 cents per diluted share, versus $12.29 billion, or 49 cents per share, within the year-ago interval.
Nvidia reported a 73% gross margin within the quarter, which was down three factors on an annual foundation. The corporate stated the decline in gross margin was as a consequence of newer information heart merchandise that had been extra sophisticated and costly.
Income continues to surge at Nvidia as the corporate rides the AI increase with its information heart graphics processing items, or GPUs, which comprise the overwhelming majority of the marketplace for AI accelerators. Nvidia’s income within the quarter rose 78%, and full fiscal-year income for Nvidia rose 114% to $130.5 billion.
Nevertheless, Nvidia’s progress is slowing as the corporate turns into bigger. Throughout the fourth-quarter of fiscal 2024, Nvidia gross sales greater than tripled.
A lot of the main focus this calendar yr is on how shortly the corporate can ship its next-generation AI processors, known as Blackwell.
Nvidia stated it had $11 billion in Blackwell income through the fourth quarter. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated demand for Blackwell is “superb” in a press release, and Kress known as it “the quickest product ramp in our firm’s historical past.”
“Blackwell gross sales had been led by giant cloud service suppliers which represented roughly 50% of our Information Heart income,” Kress stated in a press release.
Blackwell gross sales, in addition to gross sales of the earlier era Hopper AI chips, are reported within the firm’s information heart enterprise. That unit now represents 91% of the corporate’s whole gross sales, up from 83% a yr in the past and 60% in the identical interval of 2023. In whole, information heart income has elevated about tenfold over the previous two years.
Nvidia stated it had $35.6 billion in information heart income within the fourth quarter, which was up 93% on an annual foundation. That additionally surpassed StreetAccount expectations of $33.65 billion.
Nvidia officers informed traders that whereas its chips had been beforehand used to develop, or practice, synthetic intelligence, its new chips akin to Blackwell can be used to ship AI software program, a course of usually known as inference.
Kress additionally addressed investor issues that environment friendly fashions akin to DeepSeek’s R1 might restrict the necessity for extra Nvidia chips. New methods of working AI fashions that ask the AI to generate further info to “suppose” by responses might require as a lot as 100 instances the quantity of Nvidia chips, she stated.
“Lengthy-thinking, reasoning AI can require 100 instances extra compute per activity in comparison with one shot inferences,” Kress stated.
“The overwhelming majority of our compute at this time is definitely inference,” Huang informed traders. He stated next-generation AI algorithms might even want hundreds of thousands of instances the present quantity of computing capability.
Huang additionally addressed questions on whether or not Nvidia’s enterprise might be threatened by customized chips being developed by know-how corporations akin to Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
“Simply because the chip is designed does not imply it will get deployed,” Huang stated.
The corporate’s information heart enterprise this quarter additionally included $3 billion in gross sales for the corporate’s networking elements, that are used to attach a whole lot of hundreds of GPUs collectively. Nevertheless, whereas Nvidia had signaled that networking was a progress alternative for the corporate, networking gross sales had been down 9% from a yr in the past.
The corporate’s gaming enterprise, which incorporates graphics processors for taking part in 3D video games, reported $2.5 billion in gross sales versus StreetAccount expectations of $3.04 billion. Nvidia’s graphics gross sales truly declined 11% on an annual foundation. The corporate introduced new graphics playing cards for shoppers through the quarter that share the identical Blackwell structure as the corporate’s AI chips.
One of many firm’s progress classes is its enterprise promoting chips for vehicles and robots. Nvidia stated on Wednesday that it had $570 million in automotive gross sales through the quarter, which is a small fraction of the corporate’s AI enterprise, however which represents a 103% rise on a year-over-year foundation.
Nvidia stated it spent $33.7 billion on share repurchases in its fiscal 2025.
