Nvidia books record quarter due to continued AI boom

Revenue increased 78% last year driven by demand for Blackwell chips

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Jensen Huang, Nvidia

Nvidia again exceeded Wall Street expectations with fourth-quarter revenue of $39.3 billion (€37.5 billion), up 78% compared with the same period last year. Net profit grew to $22.1 billion, or 89 cents per share.

For the full fiscal year, Nvidia posted total revenue of $130.5 billion, up 114% from last year. Profit for the year was $74.3 billion, more than double the previous year’s figure.

The data cenetre business remains Nvidia’s growth engine with revenues of $35.6 billion, up 93% year-on-year. This division now represents 91% of the company’s total revenue. A year ago it was 83%, and in the same period of 2023 only 60%.

Interestingly, Nvidia’s growth does slow as the company grows. During the fourth quarter of last fiscal year, sales had still tripled.

Much of the attention this quarter went to the launch of Blackwell, Nvidia’s new generation of AI chips. These chips generated $11 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter. According to CEO Jensen Huang, demand for Blackwell has been “tremendous” and it represents “the fastest product launch in our company’s history.”

About half of data centre revenue came from large cloud service providers, which are the main buyers of Blackwell chips.

For the first quarter of the new fiscal year, Nvidia expects revenue of about $43 billion, representing annual growth of about 65%. This exceeds analysts’ expectations of $41.78 billion.

Finance director Colette Kress expects “a significant increase” in sales of Blackwell chips in the first quarter. According to her, the new AI algorithms are much more demanding in terms of computing power. “AI that can reason can require up to 100 times more computing power per task compared to simpler inferences,” Kress said in a statement.

Despite the strong results, investors are watching with suspicion the rise of China’s DeepSeek, which recently launched a more efficient AI model. This raised questions about the need for the most expensive and powerful Nvidia chips.

Huang addressed these concerns by emphasising that Blackwell is specifically designed for this new phase in AI development. “We designed Blackwell for this moment,” he said during a conference call with investors.

Business AM

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