5 Big Figures Underscoring Nvidia’s ‘Very Strong’ First-Quarter Earnings

The main contributor was Nvidia’s data center revenue, which more than quintupled in the first quarter from the same period last year, growing 427 percent year-over-year to $22.5 billion.

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-fueled 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 April 28.

[Related: Analysis: How Nvidia Surpassed Intel In Annual Revenue And Won The AI Crown]

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 data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center—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 $26 Billion In Quarterly Revenue

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

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

Nvidia Beats Wall Steet’s Revenue Expectations By $1.5 Billion

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

Data Center Revenue More Than Quintupled Year-Over-Year

Nvidia’s data center revenue more than quintupled in the first quarter from the same period last year, growing 427 percent year-over-year to $22.5 billion.

This represented a 23 percent increase from the previous quarter, allowing the company’s data center segment to represent 87 percent of total revenue in the three-month period.

The largest driver for Nvidia’s data center revenue were its GPUs and associated compute platforms. Sales of the products grew 478 percent year-over-year and 29 percent sequentially to $19.4 billion, which made up 87 percent of total data center 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 percent year-over-year but declined 5 percent sequentially to $3.2 billion, a smaller share of total data center 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 “data center 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 percent of total data center revenue for the quarter.

Nvidia Expects Revenue To Grow To $28 Billion In Second Quarter

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

This figure also surpassed Wall Street’s expectations by roughly $1.4 billion.

Gross Margin Grew To 78.4 Percent

Nvidia said its gross margin grew 2.4 points sequentially to 78.4 percent 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 “favorable component costs.”