Achi news desk-
SAN FRANCISCO –
Nvidia on Wednesday beat Wall Street estimates as its profits rose, bolstered by the chipmaking dominance that has made the company an icon of the artificial intelligence boom.
Its net income rose more than seven times from a year earlier, jumping to $14.88 billion in its first quarter ended April 28 from US$2.04 billion a year earlier. Revenue more than tripled, rising to $26.04 billion from $7.19 billion in the previous year.
“The next industrial revolution has begun,” CEO Jensen Huang declared on a conference call with analysts. Huang predicted that the companies that snap up Nvidia’s chips will use them to build a new type of data centers that he called “AI factories” designed around a “new commodity — artificial intelligence.”
Huang added that training AI models becomes a faster process as they learn to become “multimodal” — that is, able to understand text, speech, images, video and 3-D data — and also “learn to reason and plan.”
The company reported earnings per share adjusted to exclude one-time items of $6.12, well above the $5.60 that Wall Street analysts had expected, according to FactSet. It also announced a 10-for-1 stock split, a move it said will make its shares more accessible to employees and investors.
And its dividend increased to 10 cents a share from 4 cents.
Shares in Nvidia Corp rose. more than six percent in after-hours trading to $1006.89. The stock has risen more than 200 percent in the past year.
The company, based in Santa Clara, California, created an early lead in the hardware and software needed to tailor its technology to AI applications, in part because founder and CEO Jensen Huang has began to push the company into what was considered at the time to be stagnant. half-baked technology more than a decade ago. It also makes chips for gaming and cars.
The company now has the third highest market value on Wall Street, behind only Microsoft and Apple.
“Nvidia is defying gravity again,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst with Emarketer, of the quarterly report, Although many tech companies are eager to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, which has achieved a level of hardware dominance in AI that competing with earlier computing pioneers. such as Intel Corp., “are not quite there yet,” he added.
The demand for productive AI systems that can compose documents, render images and serve as increasingly lifeless personal assistants has fueled astronomical sales of Nvidia’s specialized AI chips over the past year. Tech giants Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have all indicated that they will need to spend more in the coming months on the chips and data centers needed to train and operate their AI systems.
