American multinational corporation and technology company Nvidia reported its fiscal First-quarter earnings, surpassing analyst expectations with a 262% jump in sales.

The company’s net income rose more than sevenfold compared to the previous year, jumping to $14.88 billion in its first quarter that ended April 28 from $2.04 billion a year earlier. Revenue more than tripled, rising to $26.04 billion from $7.19 billion in the previous year, surpassing LSEG’s expectation of $24.65 billion.

Nvidia reported earnings per share adjusted to exclude one-time items of $6.12, well above Wall Street’s expectation of $5.60. Shares rose more than 4% in after-hours trading to $991.85. The stock has risen more than 200% in the past year.

For the quarter, GAAP earnings per diluted share was $5.98, up 21% from the previous quarter and up 629% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share was $6.12, up 19% from the previous quarter and up 461% from a year ago.

Nvidia said its data center category rose 427% from the year-ago quarter to $22.6 billion in revenue. The company’s CFO Colette Kress said in a statement that it was due to shipments of the company’s Hopper graphics processors, which include the company’s H100 GPU.

“A big highlight this quarter was Meta’s announcement of Lama 3, their latest large language model which used 24,000 H1000 CPUs”, Kress said on a call with analysts.

Even as Nvidia reports a tripling or more of its business, CEO Jensen Huang said that the company’s next-generation AI GPU, called Blackwell, would lead to more growth.

In his words,

“Our data center growth was fueled by strong and accelerating demand for generative AI training and inference on the Hopper platform. Beyond cloud service providers, generative AI has expanded to consumer internet companies, and enterprise, sovereign AI, automotive, and healthcare customers, creating multiple multibillion-dollar vertical markets.

“We are poised for our next wave of growth. The Blackwell platform is in full production and forms the foundation for trillion-parameter-scale generative AI. Spectrum-X opens a brand-new market for us to bring large-scale AI to Ethernet-only data centers. And NVIDIA NIM is our new software offering that delivers enterprise-grade, optimized generative AI to run on CUDA everywhere — from the cloud to on-prem data centers and RTX AI PCs — through our expansive network of ecosystem partners.”

Nvidia also highlighted strong sales of its networking parts, which are increasingly important as companies build clusters of tens of thousands of chips that need to be connected. Nvidia said that it had $3.2 billion in networking revenue, primarily its Infiniband products, which was over three times higher than last year’s sales.

As demand for generative AI systems that can compose documents, make images, and serve as increasingly lifelike personal assistants continues to surge, it has fueled astronomical sales of Nvidia’s specialized AI chips over the past year.  The company now boasts the third highest market value on Wall Street, behind only tech giants Microsoft and Apple.

LinkedIn Summary

In a first-quarter earnings report hyped as a bellwether for tech stocksand a burgeoning AI economy, Nvidia blew past Wall Street forecasts and posted $26 billion in sales — a 262% increase from one year ago. The company, whose microchips power everything from Google’s Gemini to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, also projected $28 billion in sales for the current quarter. The figure not only exceeds the $26.6 billion analysts had forecast, but it also signals that spending on artificial intelligence remains strong.

• This was the third consecutive quarter in which Nvidia has seen growth exceeding 200%. Its shares surpassed the $1,000 mark for the first time in extended trading following the earnings beat, even after a massive run-up in shares this year.
• Nvidia also announced a 10-for-1 stock splitvand raised its dividend.