From Seeking Alpha, February 21, 2024:
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call February 21, 2024 5:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Simona Jankowski - VP, IR
Colette Kress - EVP & CFO
Jensen Huang - President & CEO
Conference Call Participants
Toshiya Hari - Goldman Sachs
Joe Moore - Morgan Stanley
Stacy Rasgon - Bernstein Research
Matt Ramsay - TD Cowen
Timothy Arcuri - UBS
Ben Reitzes - Melius Research
C.J. Muse - Cantor Fitzgerald
Aaron Rakers - Wells Fargo
Harsh Kumar - Piper Sandler
Operator
Good afternoon. My name is Rob and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the NVIDIA's Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]....
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.....Q4 was another record quarter. Revenue of $22.1 billion was up 22% sequentially and up to 265% year-on-year and well above our outlook of $20 billion. For fiscal 2024, revenue was $60.9 billion and up 126% from the prior year.
Starting with data center. Data center revenue for the fiscal 2024 year was $47.5 billion, more than tripling from the prior year. The world has reached the tipping point of new computing era. The $1 trillion installed base of data center infrastructure is rapidly transitioning from general purpose to accelerated computing.
As Moore's Law slows while computing demand continues to skyrocket, companies may accelerate every workload possible to drive future improvement in performance, TCO and energy efficiency. At the same time, companies have started to build the next generation of modern data centers, what we refer to as AI factories, purpose built to refine raw data and produce valuable intelligence in the era of generative AI
In the fourth quarter, data center revenue of $18.4 billion was a record, up 27% sequentially and up 409% year-over-year, driven by the NVIDIA Hopper GPU computing platform along with InfiniBand end-to-end networking. Compute revenue grew more than 5x and networking revenue tripled from last year. We are delighted that supply of Hopper architecture products is improving. Demand for Hopper remains very strong. We expect our next-generation products to be supply constrained as demand far exceeds supply.
Fourth quarter data center growth was driven by both training and inference of generative AI and large language models across a broad set of industries, use cases and regions. The versatility and leading performance of our data center platform enables a high return on investment for many use cases, including AI training and inference, data processing and a broad range of CUDA accelerated workloads. We estimate in the past year approximately 40% of data center revenue was for AI inference.
Building and deploying AI solutions has reached virtually every industry. Many companies across industries are training and operating their AI models and services at scale, enterprises across NVIDIA AI infrastructure through cloud providers, including hyperscales, GPU specialized and private clouds or on-premise. NVIDIA's computing stack extends seamlessly across cloud and on-premise environments, allowing customers to deploy with a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy. In the fourth quarter, large cloud providers represented more than half of our data center revenue, supporting both internal workloads and external public cloud customers.
Microsoft recently noted that more than 50,000 organizations use GitHub Copilot business to supercharge the productivity of their developers, contributing to GitHub revenue growth accelerating to 40% year-over-year. And Copilot for Microsoft 365 adoption grew faster in its first two months than the two previous major Microsoft 365 enterprise suite releases did.
Consumer internet companies have been early adopters of AI and represent one of our largest customer categories. Companies from search to e-commerce, social media, news and video services and entertainment are using AI for deep learning-based recommendation systems. These AI investments are generating a strong return by improving customer engagement, ad conversation and click-throughs rates....
....MUCH MORE
If the transcript is unavailable, Investopedia has four takeaways including:
About 40% of Record Data Center Revenue From AI
"We estimate in the past year approximately 40% of data center revenue was for AI inference," Colette Kress, Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) reported.
Nvidia Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jensen Huang later said that the 40% estimate is "probably understated" due to the use of deep learning and generative AI (GenAI) interfaces for online recommender systems.....
Related, the intro to the post immediately immediately below:
The Next Platform Mocked Nvidia: "Even Nvidia Can’t Get Enough H100s For Its Supercomputer" (NVDA)
Re: today's earnings release, as the analysts say on the conference calls, "Great quarter, guys."
The two key takeaways: growth in data center (mainly AI chips) revenue from $3.62 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023 to the just-reported $18.4 billion for Q4, 2024.
Secondly: profit margins are approaching those of software publishers or designers like ARM (okay, that's hyperbole, software and ARM can tag 90%+) 76.0% in Q4 '24 vs. 63.3% in Q4 '23.
That combination of incredibly fast top-line growth and expanding margins resulted in this little line:"GAAP earnings per diluted share was $4.93, up 33% from the previous quarter and up 765% from a year ago.""Great quarter, guys."
