Nvidia posts fresh record results as capital expenditure hits new highs

Chip heavyweight Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company, reported record profits in its latest quarter on Wednesday, fueled by surging demand for AI computing power.

“The demand for tokens in the world has gone completely exponential,” CEO Jensen Huang said during a call with analysts after the results were released. “I think we’re all seeing that, to the point where even our six-year-old GPUs in the cloud are completely consumed, and the pricing is going up.”NVIDIA posted $68 billion in revenue for the most recent quarter, a 73% jump from the same period a year earlier. Of that total, $62 billion came from the company’s data centre segment.

In a notable breakdown, Nvidia split its data centre sales into $51 billion in compute revenue, largely tied to GPUs and $11 billion from networking products such as NVLink. For the full year, Nvidia said it generated $215 billion in revenue.

As in prior quarters, Nvidia reported no revenue from chip exports to China, despite the U.S. government’s recent move to lift export restrictions. “While the U.S. government approved small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers, they have yet to generate any revenue, and we do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China,” said Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer.

“Our competitors in China, bolstered by recent IPOs, are making progress,” she added, in what appeared to be a reference to Moore Threads’ IPO in December, “and have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry over the long term.”

During the investor call, Huang also spoke about Nvidia’s pending investment in OpenAI, widely reported as a $30 billion deal.

“We continue to work with OpenAI toward a partnership agreement. We believe we are close,” Huang said. He also pointed to Nvidia’s partnerships with Anthropic and Meta, and with Elon Musk’s xAI. However, filings Nvidia submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday stressed that there was “no assurance” that any investment would ultimately happen.

Huang also responded to concerns about whether big tech companies can sustain their massive capital expenditure commitments, saying he expects those computing investments to translate into revenue soon.

“In this new world of AI, compute is revenue. Without compute, there’s no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there’s no way to grow revenues,” Huang said. “We’ve reached the inflexion point, and we’re generating profitable tokens that are productive for customers and profitable for the cloud service providers”