- Nvidia announced it will ship new Blackwell AI chips next quarter amid rising demand.
- CEO Jensen Huang highlighted strong interest in both Blackwell and now HopperChip.
- Nvidia shares soared on the back of 262% sales growth and the announcement of a 10-for-1 stock split.
Nvidia just announced that its hot new AI chip, the Blackwell, will ship this quarter, and buyers are already rushing in.
“People want to deploy these data centers now,” CEO Jensen Huang told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
“They want to put our GPUs to work right now to make money and save money, so the demand is very strong,” Huang added, referring to graphics processing units.
Nvidia announced in March that its customers for Blackwell's chips include major technology companies, including Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Tesla.
Huang said Blackwell's chips will begin shipping in the second quarter, with production ramping up in the third quarter. Data centers should be running on the chips by the fourth quarter.
This demand applies not only to Nvidia's long-awaited Blackwell AI chip, which was first announced in March, but also to the company's current Hopper chip.
With demand so high, Nvidia plans to produce a new generation of chips every year instead of every other year.
“I can announce that after Blackwell, we have another chip. We work on a one-year cycle,” Huang said on an earnings conference call.
Revenue surge and stock split
Huang's comments came following another blockbuster quarter for Nvidia, in which the Santa Clara, California-based company reported a 262% surge in revenue. First Quarter Revenue increased $26.04 billion from the same period last year, far exceeding analysts' expectations of $24.65 billion.
The result is more than just a flash.
Demand for Nvidia's chips has been so high that Huang had to assure stakeholders in February that the company was allocating chips “fairly.”
That demand has sent Nvidia's stock price soaring, up 150% in the past 12 months and 92% so far this year. On Wednesday, the company's stock topped $1,000 per share for the first time after strong quarterly results.
On Wednesday, Nvidia announced a 10-for-1 stock split that takes effect next month and increased its quarterly dividend by 150%, from $0.04 to $0.10 per share.
“We are poised for the next wave of growth. The Blackwell platform is fully operational and forms the foundation for multi-trillion parameter generative AI,” Huang said on the earnings call. Ta.
