Advertisement
Semiconductors
TechBig Tech

Nvidia sales forecast gets boost as artificial intelligence chips pay off and it readies a new cloud service

  • Sales in the three months ending in April will be about US$6.5 billion, the company said, lifting its share price
  • Under CEO Jensen Huang, the company has parlayed its dominance of graphics processors into a strong position in the growing market for AI hardware

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
A sign posted in front of Nvidia Corp's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on February 22, 2023. Photo: Getty Images via AFP
Bloomberg

Nvidia Corp jumped in late trading after giving a bullish revenue outlook for the current quarter, suggesting that a push into artificial intelligence (AI) processors is helping offset sluggish demand for personal computer chips.

Sales in the three months ending in April will be about US$6.5 billion, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. That compares with an average of analysts’ estimates of US$6.35 billion, according to data complied by Bloomberg.

The forecast signals that Nvidia’s push into AI computing chips is paying off. Under co-founder and chief executive Jensen Huang, the company has parlayed its dominance of graphics processors into a strong position in the growing market for AI hardware. Its chips excel at the kind of parallel processing that allows computers to make sense of large amounts of data and train software to make decisions.

Nvidia also announced its own AI cloud service on Wednesday. The company is teaming up with Oracle Corp, Microsoft Corp and Alphabet’s Google to offer the ability to use Nvidia GTX machines to do AI processing via simple browser access, Huang said. The new platform, which will be carried by other cloud service providers, will help companies that don’t have the technical expertise to build their own infrastructure.

The interest in ChatGPT has opened the eyes of business leaders to the power of artificial intelligence, Huang said in an interview. But right now, it’s mostly general-purpose software. The value will come from tailoring it to companies’ own needs so they can improve their services and products, he said.

Advertisement