Nvidia, the leading chipmaker and currently the world's most valuable company, announced record-breaking quarterly profits this Wednesday, driven by soaring global demand for artificial intelligence computing power. CEO Jensen Huang highlighted this surge in a discussion with analysts, stating, "The demand for tokens in the world has gone completely exponential." He further noted, "I think we’re all seeing that, to the point where even our six-year-old GPUs in the cloud are completely consumed and the pricing is going up."

The company's latest financial results show quarterly revenue reaching $68 billion, marking a substantial 73% increase compared to the same period last year. The vast majority of this income, $62 billion, originated from its data center operations. This segment was detailed as comprising $51 billion from compute revenue, primarily from GPUs, and $11 billion from networking products such as NVLink. For the entire fiscal year, Nvidia reported total revenue of $215 billion.

Notably, the earnings report continued to show no revenue from chip exports to China, even after recent U.S. government actions to ease some export restrictions. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress commented on the situation, explaining, "While small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers were approved by the US government, they have yet to generate any revenue, and we do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China." She also pointed to growing competition, adding, "Our competitors in China, bolstered by recent IPOs, are making progress,"—an apparent nod to Moore Threads’ IPO in December—"and have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry over the long term."

During the investor call, CEO Jensen Huang also provided an update on the company's anticipated $30 billion investment in OpenAI. "We continue to work with OpenAI toward a partnership agreement. We believe we are close," Huang stated. He mentioned additional collaborations with firms like Anthropic, Meta, and Elon Musk’s xAI. However, official filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on the same day cautioned that there was "no assurance" such an investment would ultimately be completed.

Addressing broader industry concerns about the sustainability of major capital expenditures in technology, Huang expressed confidence that current investments in computing infrastructure would soon prove financially viable. "In this new world of AI, compute is revenue. Without compute, there’s no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there’s no way to grow revenues," he asserted. Concluding on an optimistic note, Huang said, "We’ve reached the inflection point and we’re generating profitable tokens that are productive for customers and profitable for the cloud service providers."