NVIDIA Rides AI Boom to Record-Setting Revenue

By Decrypt AI, Edited by Ryan Ozawa

NVIDIA revenue set new records in its latest quarter, fueled by surging demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs)—largely to power artificial intelligence and generative AI models.

The Silicon Valley tech firm reported total revenue of $13.51 billion in its fiscal second quarter ending July 30,representing a 101% increase versus the same period last year. Revenue jumped 88% over the previous quarter.

"A new computing era has begun," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. "Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI."

Huang called out the architecture surrounding its GPUs, including networking and switch technologies and its CUDA AI software stack, saying that together, the components "make up the computing infrastructure of generative AI."

A key driver was NVIDIA's data center segment, which manufactures GPUs for high-performance computing and cloud applications. This division produced record revenue of $10.32 billion, up 171% annually and 141% over the prior quarter.

"Strong demand for the NVIDIA HGX platform—based on our Hopper and Ampere GPU architectures—was primarily driven by the development of large language models and generative AI," said Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer of NVIDIA. 

Major cloud providers like Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are adopting NVIDIA's new H100 GPUs to accelerate generative AI models, said Kress. These models include DALL-E 2 for generating images from text prompts.

The company also reported that enterprise IT vendors are also teaming with NVIDIA to deliver its AI platform into more industries. For example, NVIDIA partnered with VMware to bring its AI infrastructure into enterprise clouds.

"During the quarter, major cloud service providers announced massive NVIDIA H100 AI infrastructures," said Huang. "Leading enterprise IT system and software providers announced partnerships to bring NVIDIA AI to every industry. The race is on to adopt generative AI."

NVIDIA further bolstered its AI leadership by unveiling a series of new products and partnerships related to generative models.  This included the launch of NVIDIA AI Workbench for easily creating and customizing generative AI models, and the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine to bring intelligence to video game characters using natural language AI.

Additionally, NVIDIA teamed with partners like ServiceNow, Accenture, Snowflake and Hugging Face to accelerate enterprise adoption of generative AI.

The surging demand for NVIDIA's GPUs also lifted the company's gaming revenue to new heights. Its GeForce RTX 40 Series gaming GPUs leverage the same core architecture powering data center AI. 

All told, NVIDIA's gaming business generated sales of $2.49 billion last quarter, up 22% annually. The gaming segment made up 18% of NVIDIA's total revenue.  

We specialize in markets where our computing platforms can provide tremendous acceleration for applications," Kress said. "Our platforms address four large markets where our expertise is critical: data center, gaming, professional visualization, and automotive."

The company said it "is now a full-stack computing company with data-center-scale offerings that are reshaping industry."

NVIDIA also expects strong tailwinds ahead. The company forecasts revenue reaching approximately $16 billion next quarter, implying 57% annual growth. 

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