Nvidia sales surge on AI ‘tipping point’

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Nvidia shares jumped after the world’s most valuable chip company reported a 265 per cent increase in quarterly revenues and projected even stronger sales thanks to a spending frenzy on artificial intelligence.

Revenues were $22.1bn in the fourth quarter, far exceeding Wall Street expectations of $20.4bn, Nvidia said on Wednesday evening, adding that it expected revenues for the current quarter to be $24bn.

“Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point,” said Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang. “Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations.”

Nvidia’s shares gained more 13 per cent on Thursday to $764.36. The move puts the chip company on course to leapfrog Amazon and Google parent Alphabet and become the third most valuable US-listed company behind Microsoft and Apple.

Nvidia has been the biggest single driver of a rally in the S&P 500 this year, powering about a quarter of the gains on the index. Its importance has become so great that some investors and analysts were anticipating Wednesday’s financial report as holding a marketwide risk akin to the release of inflation data.

Nvidia said earnings per share had reached $4.93 in the fourth quarter, beating analysts’ expectations of $4.59, according to LSEG estimates.

Net income rose 770 per cent to $12.3bn compared with the same period in the previous year. The figure exceeded analysts’ expectations of $10.4bn.

Nvidia, founded in 1993 as a provider of graphics cards for computer games, has become a proxy for AI demand as Big Tech companies such as Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have all increased their investment in AI computing. Its leading chips, such as the H100, have become the industry standard for AI developers to crunch data for large language models. This has heralded a new industry known as generative AI,…