Nvidia’s Profit Hits $58.3 Billion as A.I. Boom Gathers More Steam

Another huge quarterly profit announced by the chip maker Nvidia on Wednesday provided solid evidence that Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence spending spree is still gathering steam.

Nvidia said profit in its most recent quarter was $58.3 billion, up 211 percent from a year earlier and topping expectations by financial analysts. Just three years ago, the Silicon Valley company’s quarterly profit was $2 billion — about one-thirtieth of what it is today.

Nvidia’s chips are an essential part of big A.I. projects, and other tech companies have been lining up to spend tens of billions of dollars on those chips. Nvidia is now the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, and its financial results have become a bellwether for the tech industry.

Nvidia’s biggest problem appears to be meeting demand from its spendthrift tech industry customers, a strong indication that the A.I. boom is going strong. On Wednesday, the company said annual spending on A.I. infrastructure would reach $3 trillion to $4 trillion in 2030, up from about $1 trillion today.

It was the second consecutive quarter Nvidia’s profit had doubled, and the second time the chip company had a bigger profit than other tech giants like Apple. Revenue for the quarter was $81.6 billion, up 85 percent from a year earlier, also topping expectations.

Nvidia also reassured Wall Street about its future. The company projected that sales in the current quarter would nearly double from last year, to $91 billion. That exceeded Wall Street’s prediction of $86 billion. Nvidia’s share price fell 1 percent in after-hours trading, giving up most of its gains from earlier in the day.

The company’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, said the construction of data centers, which he calls A.I. factories, had accelerated because “A.I. can now do productive and valuable work.”

“Demand has gone parabolic,” he said during a call with Wall Street analysts. “We built ahead of this moment so that when agentic A.I. arrived, Nvidia would be ready. It has arrived.”

More than a decade ago, Mr. Huang pushed his company, which made chips mostly used for video games, to develop software and chips to build A.I. His gamble helped Nvidia gain control over 90 percent of the market for the cutting-edge semiconductors that power A.I. projects.

Nvidia’s sales have been buoyed by tech giants’ conviction that A.I. will start the next industrial revolution, and Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and others have committed at least $1 trillion to A.I. data center construction. Those data centers are packed with Nvidia chips.

Not surprisingly, data center sales now drive Nvidia’s business. In the most recent quarter, the company said, revenue from data centers rose 92 percent to $75 billion — nearly all of its sales for the period.

Mr. Huang said this week that new A.I. assistants known as agents were spurring more A.I. spending. That spending is starting to lift the entire chip industry.

AMD and Intel have increased sales of traditional server chips, which can fulfill some A.I. queries. Cerebras, an A.I. chip-making start-up, went public this month. And Google, which makes custom A.I. chips known as tensor processing units, has begun selling them to rivals.

“If you run an A.I. business, you’ll take any chip you can get your hands on because there’s way more demand than you can handle,” said Daniel Pilling, a portfolio manager at Sand Capital, an investment firm.

Nvidia has responded to increased competition with new products. In March, it unveiled an A.I. system with technology it licensed from a start-up called Groq. The product, which pairs Nvidia and Groq chips, more efficiently fulfills A.I. requests through a process known as inference.

The chip maker has also begun using its swelling cash reserves to buy critical components and invest in start-ups. The company spent $95 billion in the previous quarter to secure the memory, optical fiber and other supplies it needs to make its A.I. supercomputers.

In February, it also invested in Anthropic, one of the fastest-growing A.I. companies in the world. Mr. Huang has said Anthropic will begin using more Nvidia chips.

But he hasn’t been able to execute on one of his top priorities: selling chips in China.

After the Trump administration banned sales to China last year, Mr. Huang persuaded it to reverse course and allow Nvidia to sell Chinese companies its second-most-powerful chip. But China has refused to let its companies buy Nvidia technology and instead pushed them to use domestic chip makers like Huawei.

This month, Mr. Huang traveled to Beijing on Air Force One with President Trump. He said he hadn’t raised the issue with Chinese officials. He is optimistic the situation will change.

“The Chinese government has to decide how much of their local market do they want to protect,” Mr. Huang said during on Bloomberg TV on Monday. “My sense is that over time, the market will open.”