Nvidia reports strong growth from bumper AI chip sales

Nvidia grew sales of the chips at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom even faster than Wall Street anticipated in its latest quarter, reassuring investors that Big Tech’s AI spending spree is set to continue.

Revenue was $57bn in the three months to the end of October, up 62 per cent year-on-year, and beating consensus estimates of $55bn compiled by Visible Alpha. Nvidia’s revenue forecast for the current quarter was $65bn well above Wall Street expectations of $62bn.

Shares in the chip giant jumped in after-hours trading following the announcement, after rising 2.9 per cent earlier on Wednesday.

“Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, referring to its latest graphics processing units, which have become essential to training and running AI systems like those that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The strong earnings from the $4.5tn chip company at the centre of a global AI boom comes as the stock market momentum behind the technology has sputtered. Nvidia shares were down 11 per cent from their peak in early November prior to the earnings report.

Tech stocks have tumbled in recent weeks as investors fret over the lofty valuations of big US tech groups and their huge capital expenditure on chips and data centres.

Bank of America analysts said Nvidia faced “the tough task of meeting high earnings expectations and high scepticism around AI capex”.

Nvidia’s results are seen as a bellwether for the health of the AI sector because its advanced chips power cutting-edge models such as ChatGPT. 

Net income for the quarter was $31.9bn against estimates of $30bn, with a gross margin of 73.4 per cent. Data centre revenue, which refers to Nvidia’s AI chip sales, was $51.2bn, above estimates of $49bn.

Nvidia briefly surpassed $5tn in market capitalisation in October, helped by a bullish revenue projection from Huang, as well as hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough between Washington and Beijing that would allow it to resume AI chip sales in China — which has not materialised.