GPU giant Nvidia is still enjoying the dividends brought by the wave of artificial intelligence, with its latest quarterly financial report showing revenue growth of over 200% in the third quarter. But the company also issued warnings about the impact of export restrictions, and the stock price fell by nearly 1% after the financial report was released.
Nvidia's third quarter financial report as of October 29th showed revenue of $18.1 billion, far exceeding analysts' expectations, with a year-on-year growth of 206%; The net profit also reached 9.24 billion US dollars, compared to only 680 million US dollars in the same period last year.
NVIDIA's data center business revenue increased by 279% to $14.5 billion, accounting for over 80% of total revenue. Nvidia stated that half of its data center revenue comes from cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon AWS, while the other half comes from consumer internet companies and large corporations.
Nvidia released the H200 GPU chip last week, which is an upgraded version of the currently most expensive H100 chip. Nvidia stated that Oracle Cloud is about to deploy the chip.
But while the performance frenzy continues, the company has issued warnings about the impact of export restrictions, and the next quarter's financial report may have a negative impact. One quarter of NVIDIA's data center department's sales come from China.
Colette Kress, NVIDIA's CFO, stated in a letter to NVIDIA shareholders, "We anticipate a significant decrease in sales to these destinations (such as China) in the fourth quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, but we believe that strong growth in other regions will be sufficient to offset this decline
Kress stated in a conference call with analysts that Nvidia is collaborating with some customers in the Middle East and China to obtain licenses from the US government to sell high-performance products; At the same time, efforts are being made to develop new data center products that comply with government policies and do not require licenses, but these products are not expected to have a significant sales boost for the fourth fiscal quarter.
This month, it was reported that Nvidia has launched three new products for the Chinese market in response to the expansion of export controls in the United States. But as of now, the company has not announced any new product releases.
Gartner analyst Sheng Linghai commented to a reporter from First Financial: "This is like a cat and mouse game, and it also poses challenges for Nvidia. We need to constantly change the brand and version
The development of generative artificial intelligence will continue to make GPUs a "hard currency" in short supply. Analysts expect Nvidia to be fully booked at least until August next year. These demands mainly come from countries and regions with rapid development of artificial intelligence such as the United States.
Research firm TrendForce data predicts that GPU shipments will increase by approximately 40% this year. Under this trend, Nvidia expects revenue to reach $20 billion in the fourth fiscal quarter. Kress stated in a conference call that Nvidia is still developing a plan to increase supply for the entire year next year. Some securities firms predict that Nvidia will still maintain a share of over 85% in the AI accelerator field in 2024.
At the same time, more and more technology companies are launching products that challenge NVIDIA GPUs. For example, Microsoft launched two custom-designed computing chips earlier this month, one of which can run large language models.