Nvidia is far from running out of road

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The hardest thing about being Nvidia these days is living up to the recent past. Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter report late Wednesday continued the AI titan’s string of impressive results.

Blowout spending on generative artificial intelligence continues to drive the company once primarily known for its PC gaming chips. Nvidia’s latest AI chip family, called Blackwell, racked up $11 billion in sales in its first quarter of shipping in volume, far ahead of the $3.5 billion analysts expected, according to consensus estimates from Visible Alpha. Nvidia’s total company revenue of $39.3 billion in the quarter ended Jan.

26 was up 78% from the same period last year. That blows away the growth being reported by Nvidia’s trillion-dollar tech peers. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Google-parent Alphabet averaged 11.8% revenue growth in their December quarters.

The company’s revenue projection of $43 billion for the April quarter also exceeded Wall Street’s forecast—abating some fears that the transition to the Blackwell lineup would cause a short-term hiccup in sales. The strong numbers didn’t help Nvidia’s stock price much, though. Shares fell slightly in after-hours trading after having risen nearly 4% in Wednesday’s regular session.

Revenue beat Wall Street’s consensus by about $1.2 billion, which is actually the smallest margin since Nvidia’s AI business started booming in early 2023. The company also confirmed that its newest product line—a family of AI chips and full-computing systems branded as Blackwell—will cause a small hit to the company’s gross margin for much of this year. Investors shouldn’t fret over the latter.