Thursday, November 21, 2024

"Nvidia’s Earnings: What We Learned"

That the real treasure is the friends we make along the way?

From Barron's, November 20: 

Nvidia reported strong fiscal third quarter earnings late Wednesday and provided a revenue forecast for the January quarter that was slightly ahead of expectations.

Here's what we learned from the highly-anticipated report:

Stellar earnings. Nvidia reported October quarter adjusted earnings per share of 81 cents, compared to Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 75 cents, according to FactSet. Revenue came in at $35.1 billion, which was ahead the analyst expectations of $33.2 billion.

Decent guidance. The outlook was slightly above estimates. For the current quarter, Nvidia provided a revenue forecast range with a midpoint of $37.5 billion. That's above analysts' consensus of $37.1 billion.

Data center revenue doubled. Nvidia said that large cloud computing providers accounted for about 50% of its data center revenue in the quarter. The chip maker generated data center revenue of $30.8 billion in the October quarter, up 112% year over year.

Blackwell demand is off the charts. Nvidia management said it won't be able to meet all of the demand for its next generation Blackwell GPU from its customers. “Both Hopper and Blackwell systems have certain supply constraints, and the demand for Blackwell is expected to exceed supply for several quarters in fiscal 2026,” Nvidia's chief financial officer said Wednesday in a letter to investors.

AI model scaling goes on. CEO Jensen Huang says that worries about the pace of AI model improvements are overblown. “Pre training scaling is intact,” he said on Wednesday's conference call with analysts and investors when asked about the current state of AI. “The evidence is that it continues to scale.”....