Nvidia posts $26 billion Q1 revenue amid record AI GPU demand surge

Nvidia on Wednesday reported its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2025, which ended on April 28, 2024. Due to overwhelming demand for its processors for AI and HPC workloads, the company recorded its best quarter ever and provided an even stronger outlook for its second quarter.

Nvidia reported a record quarterly revenue of $26.0 billion, up 18% from Q4 and up 262% year-over-year (YoY). Nvidia’s GAAP net income for Q1 FY 2025 was $14.881 billion, up 21% from $12.285 billion in the previous quarter and up a whopping 628% from $2.043 billion in the same quarter a year before. The company’s gross margin reached a phenomenal 78.4%, up from 64.6% in Q1 FY2024.

(Image credit: Nvidia)

Datacenter

Datacenter is now Nvidia’s main source of revenue and income. The green company’s datacenter revenue hit a record $22.563 billion (which includes networking), increasing 427% year-over-year and 23% sequentially. That happened even though the company could no longer sell its high-performance GPUs to China. 

Compute revenue reached $19.4 billion, up 478% year-over-year and 29% sequentially, driven by higher shipments of Hopper GPUs for AI applications. InfiniBand networking revenue was $3.2 billion, up 242% year-over-year but down 5% sequentially due to supply timing. Strong growth was observed across all customer types, especially enterprise and consumer Internet companies. Large cloud providers represented mid-40% of datacenter revenue and drove significant growth with the deployment of Nvidia AI infrastructure. 

“Our datacenter growth was fueled by strong and accelerating demand for generative AI training and inference on the Hopper platform,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “Beyond cloud service providers, generative AI has expanded to consumer internet companies, and enterprise, sovereign AI, automotive and healthcare customers, creating multiple multibillion-dollar vertical markets.”

Graphics

Nvidia’s gaming revenue increased to $2.647 billion, up 18% year-over-year, but declined 8% sequentially, which is in line with seasonality as sales of standalone graphics processors (including those for laptops) are typically down in the first calendar quarter. The annual rise was driven by higher demand, perhaps as Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 40 Super-series products. 

Professional Visualization revenue grew to $427 million, 45% year-over-year but fell 8% sequentially. The annual increase resulted from higher sell-in to partners as channel inventory levels normalized, and the sequential decline was primarily attributed to desktop workstation GPUs.

Automotive, OEM, other

Automotive revenue increased 11% year-over-year and 17% sequentially to $329 million, which is the higest result in a couple of years. The YoY growth was primarily driven by self-driving platforms, while the sequential rise was fueled by AI Cockpit solutions and self-driving platforms.  

Nvidia’s sales to OEMs were $78 million, which is flat from $77 million in the same quarter a year ago, and a decline from $90 million in Q4 FY2024.

Q2 Guidance

For Q2 of its fiscal 2025, Nvidia projects revenue of $28 billion ± 2%, with GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins expected to be around 74.8% and 75.5%, respectively. Operating expenses are anticipated to be approximately $4.0 billion on a GAAP basis and $2.8 billion on a non-GAAP basis.

“We are poised for our next wave of growth,” said Huang. “The Blackwell platform is in full production and forms the foundation for trillion-parameter-scale generative AI. Spectrum-X opens a brand-new market for us to bring large-scale AI to Ethernet-only data centers. And Nvidia NIM is our new software offering that delivers enterprise-grade, optimized generative AI to run on CUDA everywhere — from the cloud to on-prem data centers and RTX AI PCs — through our expansive network of ecosystem partners.”

Nvidia also announced a ten-for-one stock split effective June 7, 2024, aimed at making stock ownership more accessible. Additionally, the company increased its quarterly cash dividend by 150% to $0.01 per share on a post-split basis, payable on June 28, 2024.