Nvidia has another record quarter amid record capex spends

This is what chip giant and the world’s most valuable company Nvidia reports record profits in the most recent quarter on Wednesday, as demand for AI computers continues to rise.

“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 being completely consumed and prices are going up.”

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

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

As in previous quarters, the company reported no revenue from chip exports to China, despite the recent lifting of export restrictions by the US government. “While small quantities of H200 products for Chinese customers have been approved by the U.S. government, they have yet to generate any revenue and we do not know whether imports into China will be permitted,” said Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer.

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

During the investor call, Huang also discussed the company’s upcoming investment in OpenAI reported at $30 billion.

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

Huang also expressed concerns about the sustainability of technology companies’ investment commitments, saying he believed the computer investments would soon generate revenue.

“In this new world of AI, computing is a challenge is gain. Without computing power, there is no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there is no way to grow revenue,” said Huang. “We have reached the inflection point and we are generating profitable tokens that are productive for customers and profitable for the cloud service providers.”