Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang released an optimistic signal in the company's third-quarter financial report, and judging from the financial report data, this optimism may be well-founded. NVIDIA's third-quarter revenue reached $57 billion, a 62% increase from the same period last year; net income based on U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) was $32 billion, a year-on-year increase of 65%. Revenue and profit both beat Wall Street expectations.
It can be seen from the revenue structure that NVIDIA's vigorous growth mainly relies on its data center business. The business' quarterly revenue hit a record $51.2 billion, up 25% sequentially and 66% year-over-year. Of the remaining $6.8 billion in revenue, the gaming business contributed $4.2 billion, with the remainder coming from the professional visualization business and the automotive business.
Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress pointed out in a statement to shareholders that the growth of the data center business is due to the acceleration of computing demand, the development of high-performance AI models and the promotion of intelligent agent applications. During the third quarter earnings call, Kress mentioned that the AI factory and infrastructure projects announced by the company this quarter required a cumulative total of 5 million GPUs.
"This demand covers all markets, including cloud service providers (CSPs), sovereign state agencies, modern enterprises and supercomputing centers, including multiple landmark large-scale construction projects." Kress said.
The GPU product "Blackwell Ultra" released in March this year with various configurations has performed particularly strongly and has now become the company's main product. Early versions of the Blackwell architecture also continue to see strong demand, Nvidia said.
Jen-Hsun Huang said that sales of the Blackwell series of GPUs have "broken records."
"Blackwell series sales have broken records, and cloud GPUs have been sold out." Jen-Hsun Huang said in the third quarter financial statement. "Whether it is model training or inference, computing needs are accelerating and increasing - both are rising exponentially. We have entered a virtuous cycle of AI: the AI ecosystem is rapidly expanding, and more and more basic model developers and AI start-ups are emerging, covering wider industries and involving more countries. AI is everywhere and empowers everything at the same time."
However, Kress also mentioned that the company's data center GPU product H20, designed for generative AI and high-performance computing, shipped only US$50 million this quarter - this performance was lower than expected due to the inability to sell to China.
Most importantly, Nvidia has a positive outlook for future growth: fourth-quarter revenue is expected to reach $65 billion. The expectation sent the company's shares up more than 4% in after-hours trading.
At least in Huang Renxun's view, the conclusion is very clear: there is no need to worry about bubbles, growth is the main theme.
“There’s been a lot of talk about the AI bubble,” Huang said during the earnings call, “but from our perspective, we see a completely different picture.”