People stand near the Nvidia logo at its booth during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing (file). AI juggernaut Nvidia has reported quarterly revenue of $96.2bn, more than double from a year earlier, as the world's most valuable company beat Wall Street expectations and forecast even stronger sales ahead.
Shares leapt nearly 5% in after-hours trading on Wall Street. Nvidia is considered the bellwether for the AI spending frenzy, with its results largely determined by mega purchases from AI giants such as OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft and xAI.
"The AI infrastructure buildout is at full steam," CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. Revenue for the quarter ending July 26 rose 106% from a year earlier and 18% from the previous three months, comfortably above the roughly $92bn analysts had forecast.
Net profit reached $59.7bn, up 126% from a year earlier, though the figure was boosted by $7.8bn in gains from Nvidia's portfolio of stakes in AI companies. Nvidia told investors to expect about $108bn in revenue in the current quarter, well ahead of Wall Street forecasts and a signal that the company sees no near-term slowdown in AI spending. Separately, Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, a repository of open-source AI models, for $12.9bn, The Information reported on Wednesday, citing a person with knowledge of the deal.
A deal of that size would mark one of Nvidia's largest acquisitions to date and underscore how the Jensen Huang-led company at the center of the AI boom is betting that demand for the technology is expanding rather than peaking. It would also give Nvidia control of Hugging Face — which hosts open-source large language models and datasets — at a time when builders of closed-source models such as Anthropic and OpenAI are seeking to create their own chips as an alternative to Nvidia's graphics processing units.
