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It’s well-known that NVIDIA is a cornerstone of the AI boom, but its financial results released on February 26 illustrate exactly how much the company has prospered. NVIDIA saw a 78% year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue, reaching a record $39.3 billion. Quarter-over-quarter, NVIDIA’s revenue grew 12%.
“We’ve successfully ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers, achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter,” said NVIDIA CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang in a press release. “AI is advancing at light speed as agentic AI and physical AI set the stage for the next wave of AI to revolutionize the largest industries.”
Growth driven by data centers and Blackwell chips
Data center revenue was especially remarkable, with quarterly revenue of $35.6 billion – that’s a 16% increase from Q3 and up 93% from one year ago. Full-year revenue in data centers was $130.5 billion, an increase of 114%.
For investors, the report could be a sign that the AI boom shows no sign of collapsing. NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU, announced in early 2024, enables the large language model training and inference required for generative AI. Cloud service providers and supercomputing initiatives have snapped up the chips.
“Demand for Blackwell is amazing as reasoning AI adds another scaling law — increasing compute for training makes models smarter and increasing compute for long thinking makes the answer smarter,” Huang said in the press release.
NVIDIA estimates predict revenue in the first quarter of 2025 will be $43.0 billion.
Generative AI requirements increase as demand goes up, too
While some conversation in the generative AI space proposes high-performance models can be trained more efficiently today than in the last year, Huang anticipates next-generation AI will need more compute. Speaking to CNBC, he said “reasoning” models that think step-by-step – like OpenAI o1 or DeepSeek-R1 – will call for more of his company’s GPUs.
As a Chinese company, DeepSeek is restricted from purchasing NVIDIA’s high-end chips. Some U.S. chips, including the NVIDIA H20, have been downgraded specifically for the Chinese market. NVIDIA’s percentage of revenue from China fell by about half due to the export restrictions, Huang told CNBC.