Nvidia had another record quarter amid record capital spending

Chip giant Nvidia and the world’s most valuable company reported record earnings in its latest quarter on Wednesday, as demand for artificial intelligence computing continues to soar.

“The demand for tokens in the world has become absolutely massive,” CEO Jensen Huang said on a call with analysts after the results. “I think we’re all seeing it, to the point where even our six-year-old GPUs in the cloud are getting fully used up and prices are going up.”

The company reported $68 billion in revenue last quarter, up 73% from a year earlier, with $62 billion of that revenue coming from the company’s data center business.

Notably, Nvidia splits its data center revenue into $51 billion in computing revenue (mostly from GPUs) and $11 billion from networking products like NVLink. The company reported revenue of $215 billion for the full year.

As in previous quarters, the company did not report any revenue from chip exports to China, despite the recent lifting of export restrictions by the US government. “Although the US government has approved small quantities of H200 products for customers based in China, they have not yet generated any revenue, and we do not know if any imports will be allowed into China,” said Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer.

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

During the investor call, Huang also addressed the company’s pending investment in OpenAI, which was reported to be $30 billion.

“We are continuing to work with OpenAI to reach a partnership agreement. We believe we are close,” Huang said. He also pointed to partnerships with Anthropic, Meta, and Elon Musk’s xAI. However, statements Nvidia filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday emphasized that there is “no guarantee” that an investment will occur.

Huang also addressed concerns about the sustainability of technology companies’ capital expenditure commitments, saying he believes computing investments will bring revenue soon.

“In this new world of artificial intelligence, do the computing He is profit. Without an account, there is no way to generate tokens. “Without tokens, there is no way to increase revenue. We have reached the inflection point and are producing profitable tokens that are productive for customers and profitable for cloud providers,” Huang said.