Another Blowout Quarter For Nvidia Amid Soaring AI Demand

Nvidia on Wednesday (Aug 23) reported $13.5 billion in revenue for its fiscal second quarter that ended July 30, more than doubling last year's figure and exceeding its own forecast of $11 billion three months ago.

"A new computing era has begun," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in an earnings release.

"Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI." he added.

The spectacular rise of Nvidia has been fuelled by the artificial intelligence boom that the growing use of generative AI has set off. Nvidia also develops and markets products for advanced networking, datacenter central processing units, and computer-assisted driving.

Nvidia's 10,000 GPUs power Chat GPT's supercomputer. A GPU could cost anywhere between $ 10,000 to $38,000, and with companies buying tens of thousands of these, revenues are likely to grow dramatically in the foreseeable future.

"Our demand is tremendous. We are significantly expanding our production capacity," Huang said at an earnings briefing after the release. "Supply will substantially increase for the rest of this year and next year," he said.

The company depends on TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co) and Samsung Electronics Co for manufacturing.

Nvidia said the biggest sales driver this quarter was its HGX system, which is an entire computer built around Nvidia's chip.

On an earlier occasion, Huang had described H100, a powerful process built by his company, as "the world's first computer [chip] designed for generative AI"— artificial intelligence systems that can quickly create humanlike text, images and content.

Driven by its stellar results quarter ending April, Nvidia, albeit briefly, joined a small band of companies valued over $1 trillion, a mantle previously occupied by four consumer-facing tech companies – Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Intel's and Advanced Micro Devices(AMD) 's inability to build products suitable for the AI sector is one of the reasons why Nvidia has gained dominance in the space. Nvidia's research team had been working on these chips since the 2000s, giving it an edge over other companies.

AMD is, however, launching new AI chips later this year to compete with Nvidia's.