Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang has no shortage of demand. What it lacks is supply.
In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance following the company’s first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Huang dismissed concerns that the company could face a lull in demand as it shifts between its current and next generation of chips. AI.
“People want to deploy these data centers right now,” Huang said. “They want to put our [graphics processing units] work now and start earning money and saving money. And so that demand is very strong.”
Nvidia is transitioning from its current Hopper AI platform to its more advanced Blackwell system. Ahead of the company’s results on Wednesday, some analysts on Wall Street raised questions about whether some customers would be more cautious about Hopper orders ahead of Blackwell units later this year.
“Demand for Hopper has grown throughout this quarter – after we announced Blackwell – and that tells you how much demand there is out there,” Huang said.
Huang added that demand for both platforms will outstrip supply next year, with the complexity of these chips also challenging the company’s efforts to keep pace.
“Every component, every part of our data center, is the most complex computer ever made in the world,” Huang said. “And so it’s sensible for almost everything to be limited.”
For the first quarter, Nvidia reported results that surpassed Wall Street forecasts, with adjusted earnings per share reaching $6.12 on revenue of $26 billion, a jump of 461% and 262% year-over-year. respectively. Non-GAAP operating profit recorded $18.1 billion in the first quarter.
In the current quarter, Nvidia expects revenue to reach $28 billion, plus or minus 2%. That’s better than the $26.6 billion expected by analysts.
The company also announced a 10-for-1 stock split – in which shareholders will receive 10 shares for every share of the company they currently own – which will take effect on June 10 for shareholders starting on June 7.
Nvidia also joined its Big Tech peers in increasing its quarterly dividend, with shareholders now set to receive a dividend of $0.10 per share, up from $0.04.
Nvidia shares rose as much as 6% in extended trading Wednesday.
Huang also discussed how Nvidia will navigate the transition from AI training, in which companies train AI models, to AI inference, where those same companies deploy models for customers to use.
Questions have arisen over whether large-scale cloud providers like Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) would abandon Nvidia’s chips for inference in favor of their own offerings.
But Huang sees Nvidia’s offerings as powerful for inference as they are for training.
“We have a great position in inference, because inference is a really complicated problem,” he said.
“The software stack is complicated. The kind of models that people use are complicated. The vast majority of inferences today are done at Nvidia. And so, we expect that to continue.”
The CEO also addressed the growth the company is seeing in sales to customers beyond major cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, saying that companies ranging from Meta (META) and Tesla (TSLA) to pharmaceutical companies are increasingly buying Nvidia. chips. In fact, the largest industry uses Nvidia’s data center chip, excluding cloud companies. It’s automotive.
“Tesla is way ahead in self-driving cars,” Huang said. “But someday we will have to have autonomous capability for every car.”
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