Nvidia’s data center business is booming, with over 400% growth since last year

of Nvidia The data center business just posted $18.4 billion in fourth-quarter sales, underscoring how the computer chip giant continues to benefit from the current boom in artificial intelligence.

As part of Nvidia’s fourth-quarter earnings, which were released Wednesday, the company said its data center business grew 409 percent from the $3.62 billion reported in the same period a year earlier. Analysts had expected Nvidia’s data center unit to record $17.06 billion in sales for the fiscal fourth quarter.

Investors are closely watching Nvidia’s data center business, which includes the company’s H100 graphics cards, which are widely used to power generative AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Since OpenAI debuted with ChatGPT in November 2022, tech giants such as Alphabet and Meta and high-profile startups including Anthropic and Cohere are increasingly releasing more capable versions of their respective large language models that require massive amounts of computing power.

In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that the social networking giant’s computing infrastructure will include 350,000 H100 graphics cards by the end of 2024, indicating that Meta is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia’s popular PC chips as part from its AI efforts.

Nvidia’s data center division has been booming, especially over the past three quarters. It is the current market leader in supplying computer chips used for AI research and products.

Here’s a look at Nvidia’s data center sales from the third fiscal quarter of 2023, which ended about a month before OpenAI launched ChatGPT:

• Fiscal Q3 2024 data center revenue of $14.51 billion, up 279% year-over-year.
• Second fiscal quarter 2024 – data center revenue of $10.32 billion, up 171% year-over-year.
• Fiscal Q1 2024 data center revenue of $4.28 billion, up 14% year-over-year.
• Fourth fiscal quarter 2023 data center revenue was $3.62 billion, up 11% from the prior year.
• Third fiscal quarter 2023 data center revenue was $3.83 billion, up 31% from the prior year.

I’m watching: Nvidia is well positioned to sell into a market with limited supply

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