Nvidia (NVDA) reported its fourth quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines.
For the quarter, Nvidia reported adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $5.16 on revenue of $22.1 billion. Analysts were expecting EPS of $4.60 on revenue of $20.4 billion. That's a massive jump from the same period last quarter when Nvidia reported EPS of $0.88 on $6.1 billion a year ago. To put a finer point on Nvidia's performance, the company reported $27 billion in revenue for all of 2022.
The company also guided higher than analysts' expectations for the first quarter, saying it anticipates revenue of $24 billion, plus or minus 2%. Wall Street was expecting $21.9 billion for the quarter.
“Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.
Shares of Nvidia were up more than 15% in Thursday trading following the report.
“Our Data Center platform is powered by increasingly diverse drivers — demand for data processing, training, and inference from large cloud-service providers and GPU-specialized ones, as well as from enterprise software and consumer internet companies. Vertical industries — led by auto, financial services and healthcare — are now at a multibillion-dollar level," Huang said in the statement.
Despite the across-the-board beat, Nvidia did have at least one negative comment in its report, with CFO Colette Kress warning that data center revenue out of China fell "significantly" in Q4 due to US licensing requirements. The US has blacklisted the sale of certain Nvidia chips to China on fears that they could be used for military applications.
Nvidia's all-important Data Center business, which includes sales of its high-powered GPUs for AI applications, saw revenue of $18.4 billion, beating analysts' expectations of $17.2 billion. The company reported revenue of $3.62 billion in the same quarter last year. Overall, Nvidia's Data Center revenue jumped 217% for the year.
While Nvidia's Data Center segment is driving the ship, its gaming business is still an important piece of the company. Revenue for the division topped out at $2.9 billion. Investors were expecting revenue of $2.7 billion, up from $1.8 billion last year.
Nvidia's stock price has skyrocketed more than 200% over the last 12 months, easily outpacing rivals AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC), thanks to its position as the world's leading AI chipmaker.
Nvidia’s growth, however, faces challenges from all sides. The company’s chief rival, AMD, is investing heavily in its own AI chips, including its new MI300X. According to AMD, the chip surpasses Nvidia’s H100 in certain workloads, but Nvidia has refuted those claims, saying AMD’s testing was incomplete. Intel also has its own server chips and continues to build on their capabilities.
Nvidia’s customers are also increasingly looking to develop their own specialized AI chips to ease their reliance on Nvidia’s offerings. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla (TSLA) are just a few of the big-name firms that either currently offer or are actively developing their own in-house AI chips.
And that could prove especially problematic as the company said more than half of its Data Center revenue in Q4 came from large cloud providers for internal workloads and external customers.
But Nvidia isn’t taking this threat lying down. According to Reuters, the company has met with Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI to discuss building custom chips for them.
Daniel Howley is the tech editor at Yahoo Finance. He's been covering the tech industry since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielHowley.
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