Nvidia's Q1 net profit reached US$14.88 billion, a year-on-year increase of more than 6 times, and its stock price exceeded US$1,000 after the market closed.

Nvidia reported first-quarter results on Wednesday that beat analysts' expectations, and its stock price broke the $1,000 mark for the first time after hours. The strong results released on Wednesday show that the market demand for its AI chips remains strong. Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun said the company will generate revenue from the next-generation AI chip Blackwell later this year. The company's stock price rose 7% after hours. Nvidia also announced that it would conduct a 1-for-10 stock split. Judging from the after-hours trend, the stock is expected to hit a new high on Thursday. The company's financial report showed that net profit for the quarter ended April 28 reached $14.88 billion, or $5.98 per share, an increase of more than six times from $2.04 billion in the same period last year. Adjusted earnings per share were $6.12, exceeding market expectations. Revenue was $26.04 billion, also higher than market expectations. Nvidia said it expects sales of $28 billion in the second quarter. Higher than analysts' current expectations of $26.6 billion. Nvidia said revenue from its data center business grew 427% from a year earlier to $22.6 billion. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in a statement that was due to shipments of the company’s Hopper graphics processors, which include the H100 GPU. “A highlight of the quarter was Meta’s announcement of Lama 3, their latest large language model, using 24,000 H100 GPUs,” Kress said on a call with analysts. She added that large cloud providers account for “about 40%” of Nvidia’s data center revenue. While the company reported a tripling or more of that business, Huang said Blackwell, the company’s next-generation AI GPU, will deliver more growth. “We’re going to see a lot of Blackwell revenue this year,” he said on the call, adding that the new chip will make its way to data centers in the fourth quarter. Nvidia also highlighted strong sales of its networking components, which are becoming increasingly important as companies build clusters of tens of thousands of chips that need to be connected. Nvidia said its networking business had revenue of $3.2 billion, mainly InfiniBand products, more than three times the revenue in the same period last year. Nvidia also said it repurchased $7.7 billion worth of shares in the first fiscal quarter and paid $98 million in dividends. The company also said it would increase its quarterly cash dividend from 4 cents per share before the split to 10 cents. After the split, the dividend is 1 cent per share. (Financial Times)