– The boom in the use of artificial intelligence continues to ensure explosive growth at the chip company NVIDIA. In the last quarter, sales of $22.1 billion were more than three times higher than a year earlier. Analysts on average had expected $20.4 billion. The shares rose nine percent in after-hours US trading on Wednesday.
At $18.4 billion, the business with technology for data centers even brought in five times as much sales as in the same quarter of the previous year. The NVIDIA technologies, originally developed for graphics cards, have long been proven in computing work to train applications with artificial intelligence. This is causing NVIDIA’s business – and stock market value – to rise rapidly.
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The numbers were awaited with great excitement. NVIDIA shares have risen by around 40 percent since the beginning of the year alone – and observers assumed that the slightest indication of a slowdown in growth would have sent the price downwards. However, NVIDIA did not disappoint.
The outlook for the current quarter was also above expectations. NVIDIA announced revenues of around $24 billion, while the market had expected an average forecast of around $22 billion.
NVIDIA’s quarterly profit jumped from $1.4 billion to almost $12.3 billion within a year. The use of artificial intelligence has reached a turning point and demand is increasing worldwide, emphasized NVIDIA boss Jensen Huang.
NVIDIA’s business is being slowed somewhat by the US government’s measures against deliveries of AI technology to China. NVIDIA is not allowed to sell its most modern chip systems, which are used to train artificial intelligence, there. Washington points out the risk that the technology could be used for military purposes. NVIDIA has not yet received an export license for a slimmed-down version of the devices, which is why it recently delivered chips whose performance is below the specified limits.
It was said that China had a mid-single-digit percentage share of the data center technology business in the last quarter. The US government wants NVIDIA to be as successful as possible in China, but within performance constraints, Huang said.
This rapid growth caused the share price to rise by 16.40 percent in US trading to $785.38. This means that the stock market value of the California company has reached the $2 trillion mark.
Editorial staff finanzen.ch and awp international