Veni, Nvidia, vici
Nvidia's jaw-dropping quarterly result is once again raising a key question: is the artificial intelligence boom a bubble, or a megacycle for the ages?
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the company’s earnings call after announcing a consensus-smashing third quarter result today. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
He’s entitled to the swagger. The chipmaker’s numbers are biblical. Quarterly revenue hit USD57 billion ($87.9 billion), versus Wall Street’s USD55.4 billion, up 62% on a year ago and 22% on last quarter.
Of that, USD51.2 billion came from data centres alone, making it abundantly clear that the company’s humble origins as a producer of graphics cards for PC gamers have dissolved into the maw of an infrastructure behemoth.
One particularly wild figure worth chewing on is that Nvidia’s networking business alone — the high-speed switches and links that let its chips talk to each other — brought in USD8.3 billion, leading the company to describe itself as the largest such business in the world. Bigger on its own numbers than Cisco's, which is synonymous with networking.
