Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says 'demand is just so strong' for its hot AI chips
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- Nvidia has announced it's shipping its new Blackwell AI chip next quarter amid high demand.
- CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the strong interest in both Blackwell and current Hopper chips.
- Nvidia's shares surged, driven by a 262% revenue increase and the announcement of a 10-for-1 stock split.
Nvidia has announced it's shipping its hot new artificial-intelligence chip, Blackwell, this quarter — and they're already getting snapped up.
"People want to deploy these data centers right now," CEO Jensen Huang told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
"They want to put our GPUs to work right now and start making money and start saving money. And so that demand is just so strong," Huang added, referring to graphics processing units.
Nvidia said in March that customers buying Blackwell chips included Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Tesla, among others, spanning the gamut of Big Tech.
Huang said Blackwell chips would start shipping in the second quarter, with production ramping up in the third quarter. Data centers should be up and running on the chips by the fourth quarter.
The demand isn't just for Nvidia's hotly anticipated Blackwell AI chip — first unveiled in March — but also for the company's current Hopper chip.
With such high demand, Nvidia is planning to produce new chip generations yearly instead of every other year.
"I can announce that after Blackwell, there's another chip. We're on a one-year rhythm," Huang said on the earnings call.
Revenue surge and a stock split
Huang's comments came on the back of another blockbuster quarter for Nvidia. The Santa Clara, California, company reported a 262% surge in first-quarter revenues from a year ago to $26.04 billion — well over analyst estimates of $24.65 billion.
And the results aren't just a flash in the pan.
Nvidia's chips have been in such demand that Huang had to assure stakeholders back in February that the company was allocating them "fairly."
Nvidia's share price has ballooned thanks to this demand, surging 150% in the past 12 months and 92% this year to date. On Wednesday, the stock breached $1,000 per share for the first time on the back of its gangbuster quarterly report.
On Wednesday, Nvidia announced a 10-for-1 stock split, effective next month, and upped its quarterly dividend by 150% from $0.04 to $0.10 per share.
"We are poised for our next wave of growth. The Blackwell platform is in full production and forms the foundation for trillion-parameter-scale generative AI," said Huang on the earnings call.