Fifth, Nvidia recently announced their third quarter 2023 record revenue of $57 billion ($23 billion for the same quarter in 2022). This is a significant 62% jump over the same time last year. Earnings surprises, or positive deviations from analysts’ earnings forecasts, have created high expectations for future quarters. This faith continues despite the very real tech talks surrounding new AI bubble. The company’s net income skyrocketed, coming in at $32 billion, up 65% compared to last year.
In large part, that windfall in revenue is from the avalanche of orders for Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture. And CEO Jensen Huang says sales of its new Blackwell GPU chips are through the roof and exceeding forecasts. Further, the company is entirely sold out of its cloud GPUs. Previous iterations on the Blackwell architecture have proven to have incredible market demand as well, making it even tougher to pry Nvidia’s iron fist grip of the entire industry.
Beyond the sales of its hardware, Nvidia’s gaming division brought in $4.2 billion in revenues last quarter. In addition, its professional visualization and automotive industries added $6.8 billion. The company last week announced a record shipment of 50 million units of its H20 data center GPU. Intended for generative AI and high-performance computing, this powerful GPU was built ground up. Nvidia had a harder time actually selling these products to China thanks to rising geopolitical tensions.
As Colette Kress, Chief Financial Officer of Nvidia, indicated that this competitive landscape, particularly in respect to China, has negatively impacted their revenue potential.
“Sizable purchase orders never materialized in the quarter due to geopolitical issues and the increasingly competitive market in China,” – Colette Kress
Kress sounded a hopeful note on Nvidia’s future interactions with both the U.S. and Chinese governments.
“While we were disappointed in the current state that prevents us from shipping more competitive data center compute products to China, we are committed to continued engagement with the U.S. and China governments, and will continue to advocate for America’s ability to compete around the world,” – Colette Kress
Huang cut through the noise around concerns that AI investments aren’t viable, saying that
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble.” – Jensen Huang
With such an impressive growth path, the narrative of a bubble developing in the AI space is countered by Nvidia’s CEO, who was focused on calming those fears.