Nvidia posted record first-quarter revenue of $81.6 billion for the period ended April 26, up 85 percent from a year earlier, and shares barely moved on the news. The company's own results release put GAAP diluted earnings per share at $2.39 and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share at $1.87, ahead of the $1.77 non-GAAP figure analysts had penciled in. Data center revenue, still the dominant line of business, came in at $75.2 billion, up 92 percent year over year.
"The buildout of AI factories — the largest infrastructure expansion in human history — is accelerating at extraordinary speed," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. The company used the results to introduce a new reporting structure, splitting its business into just two segments, Data Center and Edge Computing, in place of the four it had reported previously. Edge Computing, the smaller of the two, brought in $6.4 billion, up 29 percent from a year earlier.
Half of that Data Center total still comes from a handful of large customers. Hyperscaler revenue rose 12 percent in the quarter to $38 billion, Kress said on the earnings call, while the rest of Data Center revenue came from "AI clouds, industrial, enterprise, and sovereign customers," she added.
China remained a gap in the numbers rather than a growth line. Nvidia shipped no Hopper-family chips to Chinese customers during the quarter, against $4.6 billion in China revenue a year earlier, and chief financial officer Colette Kress addressed the uncertainty directly on the earnings call. "The US government has approved licenses for H200 to be shipped to China-based customers," Kress said. The company is not counting on that changing its numbers yet: it continues to exclude China data center compute revenue from its guidance, and Kress said Nvidia has yet to generate any revenue from the newly licensed shipments.
The board also raised the quarterly dividend from a cent a share to 25 cents, and approved an additional $80 billion in share buybacks on top of the roughly $20 billion already returned to shareholders during the quarter. For a stock that has already gained about 18 percent since January, none of it moved the market much: shares fell slightly in extended trading after the report, even with revenue, earnings and data center growth all ahead of what Wall Street had modeled going in.
Guidance for the current quarter calls for revenue of $91 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, which would extend the growth rate even as the China business stays effectively shut out of the forecast. The muted reaction suggests investors had already priced in a beat of this size, leaving the earnings call commentary on segment reporting and export licensing to do more work than the headline numbers did.
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