Nvidia has another record quarter amid record capex spends

Chip giant and world’s most valuable company Nvidia reported record profits in its most recent quarter on Wednesday, as demand for AI compute continues to skyrocket.

“The demand for tokens in the world has gone completely exponential,” CEO Jensen Huang said on a call with analysts following the results. “I think we’re all seeing that, to the point where even our six-year-old GPUs in the cloud are completely consumed and the pricing is going up.”

The company reported $68 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter, up 73% from the prior year, with $62 billion of that revenue coming from the company’s data center business.

Notably, Nvidia divided the data center revenue into $51 billion in compute revenue (largely GPUs) and $11 billion in networking products like NVLink. The company reported $215 billion in revenue for the full year.

As in previous quarters, the company did not report any revenue from chip exports to China, despite the recent lifting of export restrictions by the U.S. government. “While small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers were approved by the U.S. government, they have yet to generate any revenue, and we do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China,” Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer, said.

“Our competitors in China, bolstered by recent IPOs, are making progress,” she continued, in an apparent reference to Moore Threads’ IPO in December, “and have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry over the long term.”

During the investor call, Huang also addressed the company’s pending investment in OpenAI, which has been reported at $30 billion.

“We continue to work with OpenAI toward a partnership agreement. We believe we are close,” Huang said. He also referenced partnerships with Anthropic, Meta, and Elon Musk’s xAI. However, statements Nvidia filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday emphasized that there was “no assurance” an investment would take place.

Huang also addressed concerns about the sustainability of tech companies’ capex commitments, saying he believed the compute investments would soon bring revenue.

“In this new world of AI, compute is revenue. Without compute, there’s no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there’s no way to grow revenues,” Huang said. “We’ve reached the inflection point and we’re generating profitable tokens that are productive for customers and profitable for the cloud service providers”