On May 22nd, Eastern Time, after the U.S. stock market closed, NVIDIA (NVDA.US), one of the closely watched "Seven Sisters" of the U.S. stock market and a giant in AI chips, released its financial results for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025, which ended in April of this year. The results significantly exceeded Wall Street's expectations, reinforcing the capital market's belief that the myth of AI continues.
Specifically, NVIDIA achieved revenue of $26 billion in the first quarter, a year-over-year increase of 262%, marking the third consecutive quarter where the company's revenue growth exceeded 200% year-over-year.
Among this, the data center business achieved revenue of $22.6 billion, a substantial year-over-year increase of 427%. This business has long surpassed the professional visualization business to become the largest driver of NVIDIA's performance growth.
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NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress stated that the Q1 growth in the data center business was due to the increased shipment of Hopper architecture GPUs (such as the H100). For instance, Meta announced the launch of the Lama 3 open-source large model, which utilizes approximately 24,000 H100 GPUs.
Furthermore, NVIDIA achieved a net profit of about $14.9 billion in the first quarter, a year-over-year increase of about 628%. The gross margin, which the market was quite concerned about, also rose to 78.4%, up from 76.0% in the previous quarter and 64.6% in the same period last year, showing a continuous upward trend and reflecting, to some extent, the high demand for high-end AI chips.
Currently, AI technology is still developing at a breakneck pace. Data shows that the combined capital expenditures (including finance leases) of the four major cloud providers in North America reached $48.8 billion in Q1 of 2024, a year-over-year increase of 27%. Kress introduced that large cloud service providers account for about 45% of data center revenue. The capital expenditures of these giants are expected to further drive NVIDIA's performance beyond expectations.
In addition, in the financial report, NVIDIA stated that with the upcoming launch of the next-generation Blackwell architecture chips, the company is preparing to embrace the next wave of growth. The Blackwell platform is already in production, and the company estimates that the revenue for the following second quarter may be $28 billion, still maintaining a high growth trend.
As the "seller of shovels," NVIDIA has made a fortune in the AI gold rush era, and its stock price has also risen accordingly. After the U.S. stock market closed, NVIDIA's stock price surged, breaking through the $1,000 mark to reach $1007 per share. It can be expected that the company's stock price will likely continue to set a new historical high after the U.S. stock market opens on Thursday. Since the beginning of 2023, the company's stock price has cumulatively increased by more than 550%. As NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said, "The next industrial revolution has already begun."
It is worth mentioning that in addition to announcing the performance, NVIDIA announced that it will increase the cash dividend per common share from $0.04 to $0.10, significantly raising the dividend payout ratio.At the same time, the company also announced a "1-for-10" stock split plan, which officially took effect on June 10th (Monday). This move could lower the entry barrier for ordinary investors, further benefiting the liquidity and activity of NVIDIA's stock.