At a time when technology companies were intensifying their AI arms race, chip company Nvidia released its fourth quarter financial report for the 2024 fiscal year (as of January 2024) in the early hours of February 22, Beijing time. The report showed that Nvidia's revenue for the fourth quarter as of January 28, 2024 was $22.1 billion, an increase of 22% from the previous quarter and 265% from the same period last year. After the financial report was released, Nvidia's market value surged by $277 billion (approximately RMB 1.99 trillion) in a single day, setting the record for the highest daily market value growth.
According to Nvidia's financial report, Nvidia's revenue for the 2024 fiscal year increased by 126%, reaching $60.9 billion. The annual GAAP diluted earnings per share was $11.93, an increase of 586% compared to the previous fiscal year. The non GAAP diluted earnings per share for the whole year were $12.96, an increase of 288% compared to the previous fiscal year. After the financial report was released, Nvidia's market value surged by $277 billion in a single day, setting the record for the highest daily market value growth.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Huang Renxun stated that accelerated computing and generative AI have reached a turning point. The demand from global enterprises, industries, and countries is skyrocketing.
Nvidia has also achieved growth in multiple areas. The financial report shows that Nvidia's data center business set a record of $18.4 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, an increase of 27% from the previous quarter and a growth of 409% from the same period last year. The annual revenue increased by 217%, reaching a record breaking $47.5 billion. Previously, Nvidia reached a partnership with Google to optimize its pioneering open language model Gemma on NVIDIA's data centers and various PC AI platforms. As for the growth of data center business, Huang Renxun said that the factors driving the development of data center platform are increasingly diversified, including the needs of large cloud service providers and professional GPU providers for data processing, training and reasoning, as well as the needs of enterprise software and consumer Internet companies. Vertical industries such as automobiles, financial services, and healthcare have reached a scale of billions of dollars.
In the gaming industry, Nvidia's revenue in the fourth quarter was $2.9 billion, unchanged from the previous quarter and a year-on-year increase of 56%. The annual revenue increased by 15% to reach 10.4 billion US dollars.
In terms of automotive business, Nvidia's revenue in the fourth quarter was $281 million, an increase of 8% from the previous quarter and a decrease of 4% from the same period last year. The annual revenue increased by 21% to reach 1.1 billion US dollars. Nvidia's current partners include China's Great Wall Motors, Krypton, Ideals and Xiaomi Motors, all of which have announced that intelligent auto drive system are equipped with Nvidia's computing platform.
It is worth mentioning that Russ Mould, Investment Director of AJ Bell, commented on Nvidia's stock price rise: the people who made the most money during the mid-19th century gold rush were those who provided tools, not those who were looking for gold mines. Today, Nvidia is actually playing the same role in this technological revolution.
The investor's point is that the increasing demand for Nvidia chips from technology companies engaged in an AI arms race is the direct reason for Nvidia's stock price increase. According to media estimates, Nvidia AI chips account for about 70% of global sales in this field. Although Meta, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft have all started producing their own AI chips, their current market share is still difficult to shake Nvidia's position.
It is worth mentioning that according to media reports, Nvidia also proposed to address the issue of "how to decide who can purchase its products" during the earnings conference call, and promised that this process would be "fair". Previously, due to new regulations on chip exports from the United States, Nvidia RTX flagship gaming graphics cards were out of stock overnight on multiple domestic e-commerce platforms in the Chinese consumer market.
Regarding this issue, during the financial report conference call, it was mentioned that when new restrictions were introduced, Nvidia had to suspend business, stop shipments to cope with the restrictions, and reconfigure products. Currently, Nvidia has repositioned its products and is providing samples to Chinese customers.