On May 23, local time on Wednesday, chip manufacturer NVIDIA released its financial report for the first quarter of the 2025 fiscal year ending on April 28, 2024. The report shows that the revenue for the first quarter of the 2025 fiscal year was $26.04 billion, a 262% year-on-year increase, exceeding the analyst's average expectation of $24.65 billion; the net profit was $14.88 billion, a 628% year-on-year increase; calculated according to non-US GAAP, the adjusted earnings per share reached $6.12, higher than the analyst's average expectation of $5.59.
NVIDIA expects that the revenue for the second quarter of the 2025 fiscal year will reach $28 billion, with a fluctuation of 2% up or down, while the analyst's average expectation is $26.61 billion.
In the report released on Wednesday, NVIDIA's revenue and profit for the first quarter significantly exceeded analyst expectations, and a strong forecast was made for the second quarter performance. In after-hours trading, NVIDIA's stock price rose by over 5%, surpassing $1000 for the first time. The closing price for the day was $949.50 per share, a slight decrease of 0.46%.
By business segment, in the first quarter, data center revenue was $22.6 billion, a 427% year-on-year increase; gaming and AI PC business revenue was $2.65 billion, an 18% year-on-year increase; professional visualization business revenue, including high-end graphics workstation chips, was $427 million, a 45% year-on-year increase; automotive and robotics business revenue, including automotive chips, was $329 million, an 11% year-on-year increase.
NVIDIA's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, stated, "The next industrial revolution has begun. Companies and countries are partnering with NVIDIA to shift the value of traditional data centers worth trillions of dollars towards accelerated computing and establish new data centers like AI factories to produce this new commodity of AI." He also said, "AI will significantly boost productivity in almost every industry, helping businesses improve cost and energy efficiency while increasing revenue opportunities."
NVIDIA's strong performance has become a way for investors to gauge the AI boom. The strong performance announced by the company on Wednesday indicates that the demand for NVIDIA's AI chips remains strong in the market.
NVIDIA GPUs are advanced chips required for developing and deploying AI applications, with a relatively high price. Over the past year, with companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI investing billions of dollars in purchasing NVIDIA GPUs, the company's revenue has soared.
As the biggest driver and beneficiary of AI development, NVIDIA holds over 80% of the market share in the AI chip market.
NVIDIA's largest and most important data center business includes AI chips and many additional components needed to run large AI servers, with revenue from this business growing by 427% year-on-year. NVIDIA's CFO, Colette Kress, attributed this mainly to the significant shipments of the company's H100 GPU and other Hopper architecture graphics chips.
Kress stated during the earnings call, "A highlight of this quarter was Meta releasing its latest large language model, Lama 3, which used 24,000 H100 GPUs." She added that large cloud service providers account for "around 40%" of NVIDIA's data center revenue.
Meta raised its 2024 capital expenditure forecast by about $4 billion last month. The high performance of NVIDIA's chips makes it difficult to replace its position in AI data centers. NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA software framework also solidifies this leading position, with developers using CUDA to program AI processors.
While most major players are also developing their own AI chips, analysts predict that these chips will not erode NVIDIA's market share.
"The demand for NVIDIA GPU chips remains intense," said Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk. "These results may be enough to satisfy investors and reassure the market that AI investments are not slowing down."
Huang stated that despite the more than doubling of revenue in the first quarter, NVIDIA's next-generation AI GPU under the Blackwell architecture will bring even greater growth. He said, "Our data center business growth is driven by strong demand for generative AI training and inference on the Hopper platform in the industry. In addition to cloud service providers, generative AI has expanded into multiple areas such as consumer internet companies, enterprises, sovereign AI, automotive, and healthcare customers, creating multiple vertical markets worth tens of billions of dollars."
Huang further stated, "We are prepared for the next wave of growth. The Blackwell platform is fully operational, laying the foundation for generative AI at a trillion-parameter scale. Spectrum-X opens up a whole new market for us, bringing large-scale AI into Ethernet data centers. Our new software product, NVIDIA NIM, leverages a vast ecosystem of partners to provide enterprise-grade, optimized generative AI that can run anywhere on the cloud, on-premises data centers, and even on RTX AI computers with CUDA."
Before becoming the largest supplier to major AI companies, NVIDIA's main business was gaming graphics cards. The gaming and AI PC business in the company's first quarter grew by 18% year-on-year, thanks to strong market demand. This quarter, heavyweight games like "Star Wars: Outcast" and "Black Myth: Wukong" were released in the gaming industry. NVIDIA also specifically launched new AI performance optimizations and integrations for Windows systems this quarter, maximizing the performance of the GeForce RTX series chips. NVIDIA also sells automotive chips and high-end workstation chips, but these businesses are still much smaller than its data center business. The company reported a 45% year-over-year growth in its professional visualization business. This quarter, NVIDIA released the new RTX 500 and RTX 1000 GPUs based on the latest Ada Lovelace architecture, primarily used for AI-enhanced workflows. In April, the company also launched the new flagship RTX A400 and A1000 graphics cards, bringing AI into design and productivity workflows.
NVIDIA's automotive business revenue in the first quarter increased by 11% year-over-year. The company announced that companies such as BYD, Xiaopeng, GAC Aion Hyper, and US-based Nuro have chosen NVIDIA's new generation DRIVE Thor in-car platform. This platform utilizes the Blackwell GPU architecture and will be used in the next generation of consumer and commercial electric vehicles.
It was revealed that electric vehicle manufacturers Lucid and IM Motors are using the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin in-car computing platform in their vehicle models in the European market. NVIDIA also announced that many partners are using NVIDIA's generative AI technology to transform the in-car experience.
NVIDIA stated that this quarter it will repurchase $7.7 billion worth of stocks and pay a dividend of $98 million. NVIDIA announced a 1-for-10 stock split plan and will increase the pre-split quarterly cash dividend from 4 cents per share to 10 cents per share. The post-split dividend will be 1 cent per share.
