In the early morning of the 22nd, an explosive news came from the far other side of the Pacific Ocean: Nvidia announced its latest fourth-quarter earnings report.
According to the data, as of January 28 this year, Nvidia's operating income in the fourth quarter was $22.1 billion, a year-on-year increase of 265%. The company's net profit was 1228.5 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 769%.
For the entire fiscal year 2024, Nvidia achieved a total operating income of $60.9 billion, a significant increase of 126% year-on-year, and a net profit of 297600 million US dollars (about 214 billion yuan), a year-on-year surge of 581%.
That is to say, in the past year, Nvidia has made money at an average rate of 5 per day8.6 billion yuan, this terrifying speed of making money is unimaginable.
For the United States, this news is undoubtedly explosive. As of press time, Nvidia's stock price rose more than 9% after hours, with a share price of $736. This also means that Nvidia's stock price is 746 from its previous high$11 is just one step away.
Nvidia's market capitalization is currently 167 trillion US dollars, it seems that breaking through 200 million US dollars is only a kick in the door, this is simply an elephant riding on a rocket.
Judging from NVIDIA's various revenues, NVIDIA's data center business, which is highly related to generative AI, has played a major role in the past year. According to the financial report, the operating income of the data center business in the fourth quarter was $18.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 409%, exceeding market expectations of 172$100 million.
This data also means that the data center business has accounted for 85% of NVIDIA's operating revenue.
In this regard, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that now accelerated computing and generative AI have reached a tipping point, and the demand for AI chips in countries around the world is increasing rapidly.
Compared with the bright data center business, Nvidia's revenue performance in other segments was mediocre.
Before the AI chips were sold, NVIDIA's main business was gaming revenue from laptops and PC graphics cards, but the revenue of this business segment in the fourth quarter was only 28$700 million, but still up 56% year-on-year. In addition, the automotive chip business not only did not grow in the fourth quarter, but fell by 4% to 2$8.1 billion. Finally, the operating income of the encryption chip and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) business is only 90 million US dollars.
The reason why Nvidia is so concerned by the global market is that the technology stocks that have been soaring all the way have now come to a key position. Before Nvidia released its fourth-quarter earnings report, Goldman Sachs also made Nvidia the most important ** on the planet. From Goldman Sachs's words, it can be seen that the United States attaches great importance to Nvidia.
In addition, according to statistics, one-third of the rise of the Nasdaq 100 index in the past year was actually contributed by Nvidia. Moreover, given that Nvidia now has a very large weight in major indexes, it has triggered many investors to bet, which directly leads to the fact that Nvidia's stock price performance will directly affect the trend of the United States**, and even affect the world**.
In fact, not only American investors, but also the global AI industry are now paying close attention to all the news about Nvidia. In the past year, due to the promotion of artificial intelligence, the U.S. technology industry has been in full swing, and the combined market value of the "Big Seven" of U.S. stocks such as Nvidia has even exceeded the total market value of all the world's largest stocks outside the United States.
Such an exaggerated and bizarre phenomenon has led to more and more hot money flowing into the AI market, and even many start-up AI companies have been given ultra-high valuations by this craze.
Naturally, such a fanatical phenomenon is undoubtedly the birth of an AI hype bubble for the cautious. But is the boom in the AI industry out of touch with the real economy? Presumably, Nvidia's financial report has actually given the answer.
Another objective factor is that the current AI chip market is actually the company that can get its hands on Nvidia, because Nvidia occupies more than 90% of the global AI chip market. In the last year, Nvidia's stock price has doubled by 24 times, its market value once exceeded 1 after the beginning of the year8 trillion US dollars, surpassing Amazon and Google in one fell swoop, becoming the third largest giant enterprise in the United States after Microsoft and Apple.
There is no doubt that now everyone wants to become the "arms dealer" of the second AI chip. In November last year, Microsoft withdrew from Azure Maia 100, an AI chip dedicated to training and inference. And in the past two days, a company called Groq has suddenly become popular, because this company claims that they have made a chip Groq LPU, which is 10 times faster than Nvidia's GPU, but the cost is less than 10% of Nvidia.
There is no doubt that the global AI chip war will become more and more fierce this year, and Nvidia will undoubtedly still be the first, but who is the first.
Second, third, this is not necessarily.