The chip maker said its profit in its
most recent quarter jumped 211 percent from a year earlier thanks to extreme
demand from other big technology companies.
·
Nvidia
reported quarterly profit of $58.3
billion, up 211% year-on-year, exceeding analyst expectations.
·
Quarterly
revenue rose 85% to $81.6 billion, also surpassing Wall Street estimates.
·
Just
three years ago, Nvidia’s quarterly profit was approximately $2 billion, highlighting the scale of the AI-driven
growth surge.
·
Nvidia
projected current-quarter sales of:
o $91 billion,
above
Wall Street’s forecast of $86 billion.
·
The
company stated that annual global spending on AI infrastructure could rise to:
o $3 trillion–$4 trillion by 2030,
compared
to around $1 trillion today.
·
Jensen
Huang said demand for AI infrastructure has become:
o “parabolic”.
·
Mr.
Huang described data centres as:
o “AI factories”
and
said AI is now capable of “productive and valuable work”.
·
Nvidia
currently dominates more than:
o 90% of the market
for
advanced AI semiconductors.
·
Major
technology firms including:
o Google,
o Amazon,
o Meta,
o and Microsoft
are
collectively investing at least $1
trillion in AI
data centre infrastructure.
·
Data
centre sales generated:
o $75 billion
for
Nvidia during the quarter, accounting for nearly all company revenue.
·
Nvidia’s
rapid growth is being driven by expanding demand for:
o generative AI,
o AI assistants,
o and agentic AI systems.
·
The
broader semiconductor industry is also benefiting from AI demand.
·
Advanced
Micro Devices and Intel have reported increased demand for server chips
supporting AI workloads.
·
AI
chip startup Cerebras recently went public amid strong investor interest in AI
infrastructure.
·
Nvidia
unveiled a new AI inference system in March using technology licensed from:
o Groq.
·
The
company spent approximately:
o $95 billion
during
the previous quarter securing critical components such as:
o memory,
o optical fibre,
o and infrastructure supplies.
·
Nvidia
also invested in:
o Anthropic,
one of
the world’s fastest-growing AI firms.
·
Despite
strong global growth, Nvidia continues to face challenges in:
o China.
·
Although
the Trump administration eased certain export restrictions, China has
encouraged domestic companies to use local chipmakers such as:
o Huawei.
·
Mr.
Huang recently travelled to Beijing alongside Donald Trump and expressed
optimism that the Chinese market could eventually reopen further to Nvidia
products.
Another
huge quarterly profit announced by the chip maker Nvidia on Wednesday (20.05.2026)
provided solid evidence that Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence spending
spree is still gathering steam.
Nvidia
said profit in its most recent quarter was $58.3 billion, up 211 percent from a
year earlier and topping expectations by financial analysts. Just three years
ago, the Silicon Valley company’s quarterly profit was $2 billion — about
one-thirtieth of what it is today.
Nvidia’s
chips are an essential part of big A.I. projects, and other tech companies have
been lining up to spend tens of billions of dollars on those chips. Nvidia is
now the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, and its financial
results have become a bellwether for the tech industry.
Nvidia’s
biggest problem appears to be meeting demand from its spendthrift tech industry
customers, a strong indication that the A.I. boom is going strong. On
Wednesday, the company said annual spending on A.I. infrastructure would reach
$3 trillion to $4 trillion in 2030, up from about $1 trillion today.
It
was the second consecutive quarter Nvidia’s profit had doubled, and the second
time the chip company had a bigger profit than other tech giants like Apple.
Revenue for the quarter was $81.6 billion, up 85 percent from a year earlier,
also topping expectations.
Nvidia
also reassured Wall Street about its future. The company projected that sales
in the current quarter would nearly double from last year, to $91 billion. That
exceeded Wall Street’s prediction of $86 billion. Nvidia’s share price fell 1
percent in after-hours trading, giving up most of its gains from earlier in the
day.
The
company’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, said the construction of data centers, which he calls A.I. factories, had accelerated
because “A.I. can now do productive and valuable work.”
“Demand
has gone parabolic,” he said during a call with Wall Street analysts. “We built
ahead of this moment so that when agentic A.I. arrived, Nvidia would be ready.
It has arrived.”
More
than a decade ago, Mr. Huang pushed his company, which made chips mostly used
for video games, to develop software and chips to build A.I. His gamble helped
Nvidia gain control over 90 percent of the market for the cutting-edge
semiconductors that power A.I. projects.
Nvidia’s
sales have been buoyed by tech giants’ conviction that A.I. will start the next
industrial revolution, and Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and others have
committed at least $1 trillion to A.I. data center
construction. Those data centers are packed with
Nvidia chips.
Not
surprisingly, data center sales now drive Nvidia’s
business. In the most recent quarter, the company said, revenue from data centers rose 92 percent to $75 billion — nearly all of its
sales for the period.
Mr.
Huang said this week that new A.I. assistants known as agents were spurring
more A.I. spending. That spending is starting to lift the entire chip industry.
AMD
and Intel have increased sales of traditional server chips, which can fulfill some A.I. queries. Cerebras, an A.I. chip-making
start-up, went public this month. And Google, which makes custom A.I. chips
known as tensor processing units, has begun selling them to rivals.
“If
you run an A.I. business, you’ll take any chip you can get your hands on
because there’s way more demand than you can handle,” said Daniel Pilling, a
portfolio manager at Sand Capital, an investment firm.
Nvidia
has responded to increased competition with new products. In March, it unveiled
an A.I. system with technology it licensed from a start-up called Groq. The product, which pairs Nvidia and Groq chips, more efficiently fulfills
A.I. requests through a process known as inference.
The
chip maker has also begun using its swelling cash reserves to buy critical
components and invest in start-ups. The company spent $95 billion in the
previous quarter to secure the memory, optical fiber
and other supplies it needs to make its A.I. supercomputers.
In
February, it also invested in Anthropic, one of the fastest-growing A.I.
companies in the world. Mr. Huang has said Anthropic will begin using more
Nvidia chips.
But
he hasn’t been able to execute on one of his top priorities: selling chips in
China.
After
the Trump administration banned sales to China last year, Mr. Huang persuaded
it to reverse course and allow Nvidia to sell Chinese companies its
second-most-powerful chip. But China has refused to let its companies buy
Nvidia technology and instead pushed them to use domestic chip makers like
Huawei.
This
month, Mr. Huang traveled to Beijing on Air Force One
with President Trump. He said he hadn’t raised the issue with Chinese
officials. He is optimistic the situation will change.