Nvidia’s Revenues Tripled in Q3

Nvidia reported that it earned a net income of $9.2 billion on record revenues of $18.1 billion in the quarter ending October 29. And you’re not going to believe these numbers: Those figures represent gains of 1260 percent and 206 percent year-over-year (YOY). That’s right: NVIDIA’s revenues more than tripled YOY.

“Our strong growth reflects the broad industry platform transition from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said. “Large language model startups, consumer internet companies, and global cloud service providers were the first movers, and the next waves are starting to build. Nations and regional CSPs [communications service providers] are investing in AI clouds to serve local demand, enterprise software companies are adding AI copilots and assistants to their platforms, and enterprises are creating custom AI to automate the world’s largest industries. NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, networking, AI foundry services, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software are all growth engines in full throttle. The era of generative AI is taking off.”

Well, it’s hard to argue with any of that.

Nvidia’s Data Center business was again its largest, with record revenues of $14.51 billion, up 279 percent from the year-ago quarter. Its Gaming business landed $2.86 billion in revenues, up 81 percent YOY. And the Professional Visualization and Automotive businesses brought up the rear, with revenues of $416 million and $261 million, respectively, up 108 percent and 4 percent YOY, respectively.

From my decidedly Microsoft-centric viewpoint, the two big milestones this past quarter were the introduction of Nvidia’s AI foundry service on Azure—Mr. Huang was given a long segment in the Microsoft Ignite keynote last week—and the news that the firm’s GeForce Now game streaming service now offers subscribers over 1,700 titles, including Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, and the Xbox ecosystem games Forza Motorsport, and Starfield.

Despite yet another blockbuster quarter, Nvidia disappointed investors by admitting that new U.S. export restrictions on AI chipsets to China and some countries in the Middle East would negatively impact the current quarter.

“We expect that our sales to these destinations will decline significantly in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, though we believe the decline will be more than offset by strong growth in other regions,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress noted. Bolstering that claim, Nvidia separately reported that it expected revenues in this quarter to jump about 230 percent to $20 billion.