Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will showcase the Nvidia Blackwell platform on June 2, 2024 at an event prior to the Computex Forum in Taipei, Taiwan.
Anne Wang | Reuters
Nvidia reported fourth quarter revenue after bell Wednesday after bells beat Wall Street expectations. The company also provided strong guidance this quarter.
The company’s report and guidance show that chipmakers are confident that they can continue historic growth driven by artificial intelligence until 2025.
Here’s how the company does it compared to the analyst estimates voted by LSEG:
Revenue: $39.33 billion vs. $38.05 billion estimate: 89 cents adjusted vs. 84 cents estimate
Nvidia said it expects revenues for the first quarter to be approximately $43 billion, 2% or minus 2%, and $41.788 billion, according to LSEG estimates. The first quarter forecast means annual growth of around 65% from the previous year, meaning it slowed from the 262% annual growth in the same period last year.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Cress said the company expects a “significant lamp” to sell its next-generation AI chip, Blackwell, in the first quarter.
Net income during the quarter increased to $122.9 billion, or 49 cents per share, or 89 cents per diluted share, for the same period last year.
Nvidia reported a 73% gross profit margin for the quarter. This was down three points a year. The company said the decline in total margins was due to new data center products that are more complex and expensive.
Revenues continue to skyrocket at Nvidia as they ride the AI ​​boom with data center graphics processing units or GPUs that make up the majority of the AI ​​accelerator market. Nvidia’s revenues for the quarter increased 78% from $35.1 billion, while Nvidia’s full year revenues increased 114% to $130.5 billion.
However, Nvidia’s growth slows down as the company grows bigger. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Nvidia’s sales more than tripled.
Much of the focus of this calendar year is on how quickly we can ship next-generation AI processors called Blackwell.
Nvidia had $11 billion in Blackwell’s revenue in the fourth quarter. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement that Blackwell’s demand was “surprising” and Kress called it “the fastest product lamp in our history.”
“Blackwell sales were led by large cloud service providers, which accounted for around 50% of data center revenue,” Cress said in a statement.
Sales of Blackwell and previous generation Hopper AI chips have been reported in the company’s data center business. The unit currently accounts for 91% of the company’s total sales, up from 83% the previous year and 60% in the same period in 2023. In total, data center revenue has increased by about 10 times over the past two years.
Nvidia said it had $35.6 billion in data center revenue in the fourth quarter. This increased by 93% per year. It also surpassed the expectations of the $33.65 billion StreetAccount.
Nvidia officials told investors that the chips were previously used to develop or train artificial intelligence, but they often use new chips such as Blackwell to provide AI software.
Kress also addressed investors’ concerns that efficient models such as Deepseek’s R1 could limit the need for additional NVIDIA chips. A new way to run an AI model that asks AI to generate additional information to “think” through responses could require 100 times the amount of NVIDIA chips, she said.
“Thinking long, inference AI can require 100 times more calculations per task compared to one-shot inference,” Cress said.
“The majority of our calculations today are actually reasoning,” Huang told investors. He said the next generation of AI algorithms could require millions of times more computational capacity than its current computational capacity.
Huang is also working on questions about whether custom chips developed by technology companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will threaten Nvidia’s business.
“Just because the chip is designed doesn’t mean it’s being deployed,” Huang says.
The company’s data center business for the quarter also included $3 billion in revenue from the company’s networking parts. This is used to connect hundreds of thousands of GPUs together. However, Nvidia had shown that networking is a growth opportunity for the company, but networking sales fell 9% from a year ago.
The company’s gaming business, which includes a graphics processor for playing 3D games, reported $2.5 billion in sales compared to StreetAccount’s expectations of $3.04 billion. Nvidia graphics sales actually fell 11% per year. The company unveiled a new consumer graphics card during the quarter, which shares the same blackwell architecture as its AI chip.
One of the company’s growth categories is the business selling businesses for cars and robots. Nvidia said on Wednesday that car sales were $570 million in the quarter. This is a small percentage of the company’s AI business, representing a 103% increase from the previous year.
Nvidia said it spent $33.7 billion on share buybacks in 2025.
