Nvidia sales hit record high as AI chip demand soars

Artificial intelligence chip giant Nvidia has seen its revenue double in the last quarter due to surging demands for AI technology.

The company’s stock surged by nearly 10 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday after it posted a sales growth of 101 per cent year-over-year to $13.5bn for the three months ending in July.

The company has been a pioneer in accelerated computing, popular among gamers for its GPU inventions that redefined computer graphics and sparked the growth of the PC gaming market.

In recent years, the company ignited the era of modern AI and fuelled industrial digitalisation across markets.

The American chipmaking giant makes processors behind generative AI, which form the backbone of chatbots like ChatGPT.

“A new computing era has begun. Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief of Nvidia in a statement.

“The race is on to adopt generative AI,” he said.

Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT came to prominence, many tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Snapchat have attempted to develop their own versions of the generative AI technology to better interact with users and offer human-like responses to queries.

The revenue earned by the company over the last quarter is much stronger than the $11.2bn that Wall Street analysts expected.

This surge in revenue was driven by the chipmaker’s data centre business that includes the production of AI chips.

“During the quarter, major cloud service providers announced massive Nvidia H100 AI infrastructures. Leading enterprise IT system and software providers announced partnerships to bring Nvidia AI to every industry,” Mr Haung said.

The company hopes for its earnings in the current quarter to be even greater, predicting a revenue of about $16bn.

“Demand for our data center platform for AI is tremendous and broad-based across industries and customers.” Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress said on the company’s earnings call.

“We believe global demand has returned to growth after last year’s slowdown,” Mr Kress said.