A quarter that dwarfed the year before
For the fiscal quarter ended April 28, 2024, NVIDIA reported revenue of $26.0 billion, up 18 percent from the prior quarter and 262 percent from the same quarter a year earlier. GAAP net income was $14.881 billion, up 628 percent year over year, and GAAP diluted earnings per share was $5.98, up 629 percent. GAAP gross margin was 78.4 percent. [1]
Working backward from those growth rates against the same-quarter-a-year-earlier base puts fiscal Q1 2024 revenue at roughly $7.2 billion and net income at roughly $2.0 billion. That is not a company adding a new product line; it is a company whose entire prior-year business now fits inside a single quarter's growth. [1]
One business now, not four
Data center revenue was $22.6 billion, up 23 percent quarter over quarter and 427 percent year over year. Gaming, the segment NVIDIA built its name on, brought in $2.6 billion, down 8 percent quarter over quarter despite being up 18 percent from a year earlier. Professional visualization added $427 million and automotive $329 million, both far smaller lines. [1]
Data center alone was about 87 percent of the quarter's revenue, against roughly 10 percent for gaming. A company that spent two decades known for graphics cards for PCs had become, in the space of about six quarters of generative AI demand, a data center supplier with a gaming business attached rather than the other way around. [1]
A ten-for-one split, and a dividend that didn't keep up
Alongside the results, NVIDIA announced a ten for one forward stock split: a shareholder of record at market close on June 6, 2024 received nine additional shares for each one held, distributed after market close on June 7, with trading on a split-adjusted basis starting June 10. The company also raised its quarterly cash dividend 150 percent, from $0.04 per share to $0.10 on a pre-split basis, equivalent to $0.01 per share after the split, payable June 28 to holders of record on June 11. [1]
A ten for one split changes nothing about the business; it only resets the per-share price so more shares trade at a lower nominal cost. That the dividend rose 150 percent while net income rose 628 percent shows where the quarter's cash was actually headed: overwhelmingly back into the business and its shareholders' unrealized gains, not into a larger payout. [1]
Guidance built on Blackwell, not just Hopper
NVIDIA guided to $28.0 billion in revenue for the following quarter, plus or minus 2 percent, and said its Blackwell platform, the successor to the Hopper architecture that had driven the quarter's growth, was in full production and intended as the foundation for generative AI at trillion-parameter scale. The company also pointed to demand reaching beyond cloud providers into enterprise, automotive and healthcare customers. [1]
Guidance of $28.0 billion is only about 8 percent above the quarter just reported, far below the 18 percent quarter-over-quarter growth NVIDIA had just posted. Read alone that would look like a slowdown; read against a new architecture generation being described as still ramping into production, it reads instead as a company declining to guide on hardware it had not yet shipped at volume. [1]
Sources
- NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for First Quarter Fiscal 2025
NVIDIA · May 22, 2024