Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has seen a substantial increase in sales due to the ongoing AI boom, reporting $46.7 billion in revenue, a 56% increase from the same period last year.
The company’s earnings statement revealed that its AI-dominated data center business was the primary driver of this growth, with revenue also increasing by 56% year-over-year. Nvidia’s net income rose significantly to $26.4 billion for the second quarter, a 59% surge compared to the previous year. Data center sales contributed $41.1 billion to the total revenue, highlighting the strong demand from AI companies for advanced GPUs. The company’s most advanced generation of chips, Blackwell, accounted for $27 billion of data center sales.
CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the importance of the Blackwell platform, stating, “Blackwell is the AI platform the world has been waiting for. The AI race is on, and Blackwell is the platform at its center.” Huang estimated that AI infrastructure spending would reach $3 to $4 trillion by the end of the decade, telling one analyst that “$3 to 4 trillion is fairly sensible for the next five years.”
Nvidia highlighted its involvement in the launch of OpenAI’s open-source gpt-oss models, noting that these models involved processing “1.5 million tokens per second on a single Nvidia Blackwell GB200 NVL72 rack-scale system.” The company’s earnings report also shed light on its challenges in the Chinese market, reporting no sales of its China-focused H20 chip to Chinese customers in the past quarter. However, Nvidia reported $650 million worth of H20 chips sold to a customer outside of China.
The United States has imposed restrictions on the sales of advanced GPUs to Chinese customers, though the current arrangement permits Nvidia to sell chips to China with a 15% export tax paid to the U.S. Treasury. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress clarified that the absence of shipments was due to uncertainty surrounding this arrangement, which has not been formally codified into a federal regulation. Kress stated, “While a select number of our China-based customers have received licenses over the past few weeks, we have not shipped any H20 devices based on those licenses.”
Furthermore, the Chinese government has reportedly discouraged local businesses from using Nvidia chips, leading to a reported halt in H20 chip production earlier in the month. Nvidia projects revenue of $54 billion for the third quarter, clarifying that its Q3 outlook, which has a potential shift of 2% in either direction, does not include any H20 shipments to China.
