After the US stock market closed on February 21st, Nvidia released its fourth quarter financial report.
Nvidia's financial report shows that its fourth quarter sales reached $22.1 billion, a year-on-year increase of 265%. Data center revenue increased by 409%, reaching $18.4 billion, and net profit reached $12.29 billion, a year-on-year increase of 769%.
Affected by the news, Nvidia's stock price rose by over 10% after trading. Last week, Nvidia's market value surpassed Amazon and Google consecutively, breaking through $1.8 trillion for the first time.
Nvidia's data center business includes server artificial intelligence chips, benefiting from the fierce competition of global technology giants in the field of AI big models. Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips have been competed for by companies, mainly including the H100 based on the Hopper architecture. More than half of the company's sales of data center AI chips flow to major cloud giants.
On Wednesday, after Google released an open-source version of the AI big model Gemma, Nvidia stated that it has partnered with Google to ensure that the Gemma big model runs smoothly on its chip. Nvidia also stated that it will soon develop chatbot software to be used in conjunction with Gemma, which is currently being developed for running artificial intelligence models on Windows PC.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in January that Meta's computing infrastructure will have 350000 H100 chips by the end of 2024, indicating that Meta may spend billions of dollars to purchase Nvidia chips.
In response to investors' concerns that Nvidia may not be able to maintain this rapid growth level throughout the year, Nvidia founder and CEO Huang Renxun said in a conference call with analysts, "Fundamentally, we believe that the conditions for sustained growth in 2025 and beyond will still be very good. Due to generative artificial intelligence and the entire industry's shift from CPUs to GPUs, the demand for Nvidia GPUs will remain at a high level."
Huang Renxun also stated that data center revenue is still affected by the new US export regulations. Nvidia has planned to launch a specially designed chip version for the Chinese market.
He said, "We reconfigured our product in a way that no software could crack, which took some time. Now we are providing samples to our Chinese customers."
The market is also concerned about the expected supply of Nvidia's next-generation GPU chip B100. Regarding this, Colette Kress, the financial director of Nvidia, stated that although the company has improved the supply of artificial intelligence chips, it is still expected to be in short supply.
"The supply of Hopper architecture products is improving, but demand remains very strong, far exceeding supply. We expect the supply of next-generation products to be limited," Kress said at the earnings analyst meeting.
Huang Renxun also said, "Every time we launch a new product, its demand increases from zero to a very large number, and you cannot achieve this overnight."
At present, Nvidia remains the main market leader in computer chips for artificial intelligence research and AI related products, but competitors such as AMD are catching up. Nvidia's strong financial report also drove up the stock prices of other semiconductor companies, and AMD's stock price surged by more than 4% after hours that day.
Previously, there were reports that Nvidia was forming a new department specifically to provide customized chips for cloud service providers. If Nvidia enters the field of customized chips, it will compete with industry leaders such as Broadcom. However, Nvidia did not comment on this news at the financial report meeting.