Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang has no shortage of demand. What he lacks is supply.
In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance following the company’s first-quarter earnings report Wednesday, Huang pushed back against concerns that the company could face a demand lull as it transitions between current and next-generation AI -potato chips.
“People want to deploy these data centers now,” Huang said. ‘They want ours [graphics processing units] to work now and start earning money and saving money. And so that demand is just so strong.”
Nvidia is making the switch from its current Hopper AI platform to its more advanced Blackwell system. Ahead of the company’s results on Wednesday, some Wall Street analysts had raised questions about whether some customers would be more cautious about Hopper orders versus the more Blackwell units later this year.
“Hopper demand grew this quarter – after we announced Blackwell – and that tells you about how much demand there is,” Huang said.
Huang added that demand for both platforms will exceed supply well into the next year, with the complexity of these chips also challenging the company’s efforts to keep pace.
“Every part, every part of our data center, is the most complex computer ever created in the world,” Huang said. “And so it makes sense that almost everything is limited.”
For the first quarter, Nvidia reported results that exceeded Wall Street expectations, with adjusted earnings per share of $6.12 on revenue of $26 billion, up 461% and 262%, respectively, from the prior year. Non-GAAP operating income in the first quarter was $18.1 billion.
In the current quarter, Nvidia expects revenue to be $28 billion plus or minus 2%. That’s better than the $26.6 billion analysts expected.
The company also announced a 10-for-1 stock split – in which shareholders will receive 10 shares for every share of the company they currently own – which will become effective on June 10 for shareholders starting on June 7.
Nvidia also joined its Big Tech peers in increasing its quarterly dividend, with shareholders now set to receive a dividend of $0.10 per share, up from $0.04.
Nvidia shares rose as much as 6% in extended trading on Wednesday.
Huang also discussed how Nvidia will navigate the transition from AI training, in which companies train AI models, to AI inferencing, in which those same companies deploy models for customers to use.
Questions have been raised about whether large-scale cloud providers such as Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) would drop Nvidia’s chips due to inferences in favor of their own offerings.
But Huang believes Nvidia’s offering is as powerful for inference as it is for training.
“We’re in a great position on inference, because inference is just a very complicated problem,” he said.
“The software stack is complicated. The kinds of models people use are complicated. The vast majority of inference is done on Nvidia these days. And so we expect that to continue.”
The CEO also addressed the growth the company is seeing in sales to customers beyond major cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, saying that companies ranging from Meta (META) and Tesla (TSLA) to pharmaceutical companies are increasingly Buy Nvidia. potato chips. In fact, this is the largest industry using Nvidia’s data center chip, excluding cloud companies. is automotive.
“Tesla is way ahead of the curve in self-driving cars,” Huang says. “But every car will one day have to have autonomous capabilities.”
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