The company's largest and most important business is its data center sales, which includes its AI chips as well as many of the additional parts needed to run big AI servers.
Nvidia said its data center category rose 427% from the year-ago quarter to $22.6 billion in revenue. Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress said in a statement that it was due to shipments of the company's Hopper graphics processors, which include the company's H100 GPU.
"A big highlight this quarter was Meta's announcement of Lama 3, their latest large language model which used 24,000 H100 GPUs," Kress said on a call with analysts. She added that large cloud providers make up about "mid-40%" of Nvidia's data center revenue.
Even as the company reports a tripling or more of its business, Huang said that the company's next-generation AI GPU, called Blackwell, would lead to more growth.
"We will see a lot of Blackwell revenue this year," the CEO said on a call with analysts, adding the new chip would be in data centers by the fourth quarter.
Nvidia also highlighted strong sales of its networking parts, which are increasingly important as companies build clusters of tens of thousands of chips that need to be connected. Nvidia said that it had $3.2 billion in networking revenue, primarily its InfiniBand products, which was over three times higher than sales in the year-earlier period.
Nvidia, before it became the top supplier to big companies building AI, was known primarily as a company making hardware for 3D gaming. Gaming revenue was up 18% during the quarter to $2.65 billion, which Nvidia attributed to strong demand.
The company also sells chips for cars and chips for advanced graphics workstations, which remain much smaller than its data center business. It reported $427 million in professional visualization sales, and $329 million in automotive sales.
Nvidia said it bought back $7.7 billion worth of its shares and paid $98 million in dividends during the quarter. Nvidia also said that it's increasing its quarterly cash dividend from 4 cents per share to 10 cents on a pre-split basis. After the split, the dividend will be a penny a share.
