Chip sector observers, many of them investor community bloggers, have been wondering lately if the massive wave of AI demand Nvidia has been riding this year might have crested and a trough was coming into view.
It turns out that wave is still building up energy, as Nvidia this week reported a record $13.5 billion in fiscal second quarter revenue, crushing expectations by around $2.5 billion, as analyst community consensus had revenue coming in just over $11 billion. Fiscal Q2 2024 revenue was 101% more than the company reported for the same period last year, and 88% higher than the first quarter this year.
Most of that revenue was in the data center segment, which itself was up a whopping 171% year over year to $10.3 billion. Gaming revenue was up 22% year over year to $2.49 billion, and professional service revenue increased 24% from a year ago. Only automotive, which has been a brought spot lately for other chip vendors, disappointed, as revenue from that sector was down 15% compared to last year.
Nvidia also reported earnings per share of $2.70, an astonishing 429% increase from the same time last year.
Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang stated, “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. The race is on to adopt generative AI.”
The earnings report came as Nvidia has been spending recent months focusing on introducing an array of platforms and software to help enterprises harness the explosive generative AI trend by helping them create customized generative AI applications with their own corporate data.