When there’s a machine-learning gold rush, make sure you’re the one selling the shovels
Unrelenting demand for AI accelerators fueled an 843 percent year-over-year surge in profit for Nvidia in the three months to July 30.
During that second quarter of its fiscal 2024 year, the GPU giant recorded $6.2 billion in net income on revenues of $13.5 billion, double that of the year-ago quarter.
You might be thinking Nvidia’s figures look strong this year because we’re comparing them to a bum previous year – and in 2022 it was complaining about pandemic-related supply-chain headaches upsetting its business units – but if you look at the numbers, the semiconductor titan really does seem to be on a roll lately.
We’ll dig into those numbers a little later this week; for now, here’s a summary of today’s financial disclosure.
The massive uptick in sales was driven in no small part by strong demand for Nv’s Hopper and Ampere GPUs, thousands of which are stitched together, often using its InfiniBand networks, to train large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. This was evidenced by the chip designer’s revenues from its HGX and other datacenter gear, which topped $10.3 billion during the quarter, up 171 percent from the year prior.
“Our cloud service providers drove exceptionally strong demand for HGX systems in the quarter as they undertake a generational transition to upgrade their datacenter infrastructure for the new era of accelerated computing and AI,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said on Wednesday’s earnings call.
