As AI market observers wonder if we are close to hitting a ceiling after 18 months of generative AI, Nvidia’s quarterly revenue postings continue to insist that the sky's the limit. The company this week reported a whopping 265% year-over-year jump in fiscal fourth quarter revenue to a new quarterly $22.1 billion, a figure which out-distanced expectations by about $2 billion.
That posting pushed Nvidia’s net income for the quarter to about $12.2 billion, up about $1.4 billion year-over-year, a 769% explosion of growth. Notably, the fiscal Q4 period a year ago was when Nvidia and other firms started to note how the overnight success of ChatGPT and generative AI in general were starting to affect their businesses. Nvidia also this week reported full-year revenue of $60.9 billion, up 126% from the previous year.
And, while Nvidia has been dogged by concerns that it can't keep posting one huge quarter after another, the company suggested another is playing out right now, as it projected it will reap $24 billion in revenue for the current quarter. That outlook is almost $2 billion above consensus analyst estimates for Nvidia’s fiscal Q1.
The stunning Q4 report included record Data Center revenue for a single quarter of $18.4 billion, up 27% from Q3, and a 409% leap from one year ago. That record comes after Nvidia and company observers had late last year expressed some concern about the implications that tougher U.S. government rules about doing business with Chinese companies could have on Nvidia’s Data Center segment.
“Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations.”
Indeed, the company noted success selling to cloud providers, communications service providers, healthcare enterprises, financial services giants, and many more. The only sector of customers that did not get with the program was the automotive industry. Automotive sector revenue for fiscal Q4 came in at $281 million, down about 4% year-over-year.
In addition, Nvidia is not ignoring the notion that the massive AI-driven demand it keeps talking about puts pressure on the supply chain. Nvidia CFO Charlotte Kress stated on this week’s earnings call, “We can expect our next-generation products to be supply constrained as demand far exceeds supply.”
Still, she observed that Nvidia expects Data Center revenue for the current quarter to be up both in sequential and year-over-year comparisons.
Nvidia stock price has jumped hundreds of dollars over the last year, although often careening wildly in the course of hours or days. Thursday morning, NVDA was priced at just over $779 per share, more than 15% above the closing price the day before, a jump of more than $104.