SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Nvidia on Wednesday overshot Wall Street estimates as its profit skyrocketed, bolstered by the chipmaking dominance that has made the company an icon of the artificial intelligence boom.
Its net income rose more than sevenfold compared to a year earlier, jumping to $14.88 billion in its first quarter that ended April 28 from $2.04 billion a year earlier. Revenue more than tripled, rising to $26.04 billion from $7.19 billion in the previous year.
“The next industrial revolution has begun,” CEO Jensen Huang declared on a conference call with analysts. Huang predicted that the companies snapping up Nvidia chips will use them to build a new type of data centers he called “AI factories” designed to produce “a new commodity — artificial intelligence.”
Huang added that training AI models is becoming a faster process as they learn to become “multimodal” — that is, capable of understanding text, speech, images, video and 3-D data — and also “to reason and plan.”
The company reported earnings per share — adjusted to exclude one-time items — of $6.12, well above the $5.60 that Wall Street analysts had expected, according to FactSet. It also announced a 10-for-1 stock split, a move that it noted will make its shares more accessible to employees and investors.