5 big figures underscoring Nvidia's 'very strong' first-quarter earnings

The main contributor was Nvidia’s datacentre revenue, which more than quintupled in the first quarter from the same period last year, growing 427 per cent year-over-year to $22.5bn

Nvidia once again reported triple-digit growth in revenue and profit in the latest quarter from the same period last year, a sign that demand for the company's AI chips has yet to subside several months after getting its first major ChatGPT-fuelled boost.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based GPU designer - which has, in CEO Jensen Huang's words, evolved into a "full-stack computing company" - reported the results on Wednesday for the first quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, which ended 28 April.

The AI chip giant's stock price was up more than 9 percent at market close on Thursday, which allowed it to surpass $1,000 per share, after beating Wall Street's expectations for revenue, earnings per share and the second-quarter forecast.

"The next industrial revolution has begun," Huang declared in Nvidia's earnings call.

"Companies and countries are partnering with Nvidia to shift the trillion-dollar installed base of traditional datacentres to accelerated computing and build a new type of datacentre - AI factories - to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence."

What follows are five big figures underscoring what financial analyst firm TD Cowen called a "very strong" quarter for Nvidia.

Nvidia hits a record $26bn in quarterly revenue

Nvidia's revenue for the first quarter was a record $26bn, more than triple or 262 per cent higher than what it made in the same period last year.

This represented an 18 per cent increase from how much money the company generated in the fourth quarter, when it reported a 265 per cent year-over-year boost in revenue.

Nvidia beats Wall Steet's revenue expectations by $1.5bn

With Nvidia making $26bn in revenue and $6.12 per share, the company easily beat Wall Street's expectations, surpassing the estimate on revenue by nearly $1.5bn and the estimate on earnings per share by 54 cents.

Datacentre revenue more than quintupled year-over-year

Nvidia's datacentre revenue more than quintupled in the first quarter from the same period last year, growing 427 per cent year-over-year to $22.5bn.

This represented a 23 per cent increase from the previous quarter, allowing the company's datacentre segment to represent 87 per cent of total revenue in the three-month period.

The largest driver for Nvidia's datacentre revenue were its GPUs and associated compute platforms.

Sales of the products grew 478 per cent year-over-year and 29 per cent sequentially to $19.4bn, which made up 87 per cent of total datacentre revenue.

Collette Kress, Nvidia's CFO, said the massive uplift in sales was largely due to higher shipments of its Hopper-based GPUs and platforms "used for training and inferencing with large language models, recommendation engines and generative AI applications."

Networking products, on the other hand, grew 242 per cent year-over-year but declined 5 per cent sequentially to $3.2bn, a smaller share of total datacentre sales.

Kress said while Nvidia's InfiniBand solutions drove year-over-year growth, the company's sales dragged sequentially "due to the timing of supply."

At a broader level, Kress said the company's "datacentre growth was driven by all customer types," with enterprise and consumer internet companies leading the way. She added that large cloud service providers continued to "drive strong growth," making up mid-40 per cent of total datacentre revenue for the quarter.

Nvidia expects revenue to grow to $28bn in second quarter

Nvidia said it expects revenue to grow to $28bn, plus or minus 2 per cent, in the second quarter, which would represent a roughly 7.7 per cent sequential increase.

This figure also surpassed Wall Street's expectations by roughly $1.4bn.

Gross margin grew to 78.4 per cent

Nvidia said its gross margin grew 2.4 points sequentially to 78.4 per cent in the first quarter. This figure is 13.8 points higher than it was in the same period last year.

Kress said the company had benefited from "favourable component costs."