Nvidia shares rise on stronger-than-expected revenue, forecast

Nvidia reported fiscal third-quarter earnings on Wednesday that topped Wall Street expectations for sales and earnings and provided stronger-than-expected guidance for fourth-quarter sales.

Nvidia shares rose 3%.

Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:

• Earnings per share: $1.30 adjusted vs. $1.25 estimated
• Revenue: $57.01 billion vs. $54.92 billion estimated

Nvidia said it expects about $65 billion in sales in the current quarter, versus $1.43 in earnings per share on $61.66 billion of revenue expected by analysts.

Nvidia had net income of the quarter of $1.30 per diluted share, or $31.91 billion. That was up 65% from $19.31 billion, or 78 cents per diluted share, in the year-ago period.

Nvidia has become the most valuable publicly traded company, mostly on insatiable demand for its AI chips, called GPUs. Nvidia counts Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Meta as customers. Its chips are used by all the leading AI companies to develop new models and technology.

Nvidia’s sales and outlook are closely watched by the technology industry as a sign for the health of the AI boom. 

Nvidia’s most important business is data center sales. Nvidia said it had $51.2 billion in data center sales, easily surpassing analyst expectations for $49.09 billion in sales during the quarter, a 66% rise on a year-over-year basis.

Of that, $43 billion in revenue was for “compute,” or the company’s GPUs. Networking, or parts that allow scores of GPUs to work as one computer, accounted for $8.2 billion in data center sales.

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