- Nvidia announced it will ship new Blackwell AI chips next quarter amid rising demand.
- CEO Jensen Huang emphasized strong interest in both Blackwell and the current Hopper chip.
- Nvidia shares soared after the company reported a 262% increase in revenue and announced a 10-for-1 stock split.
Nvidia has announced that its hot new artificial intelligence chip, Blackwell, will be shipped this quarter, and buyers are already flocking to it.
“People want to deploy these data centers now,” CEO Jensen Huang told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.
“They want to put our GPUs to work now to make money and save money, so the demand for that is very strong,” Huang said, referring to graphics processing units. he added.
Nvidia said in March that customers buying Blackwell chips span the gamut of big tech, 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 chips by the fourth quarter.
The demand is not just for Nvidia's long-awaited Blackwell AI chips, which were first announced in March, but also for the company's current Hopper chips.
Demand is so high that Nvidia plans to produce a new chip generation every year instead of every two years.
“I can announce that after Blackwell, we have another chip. We work on a one-year cycle,” Huang said on an earnings conference call.
Rapid earnings growth and stock splits
Huang's comments came after another hugely successful quarter for Nvidia. The Santa Clara, California-based company reported first-quarter revenue of $26.04 billion, up 262% from the same period last year and well above analyst expectations of $24.65 billion.
And the results are not temporary.
Demand for Nvidia's chips has been so high that Huang had to assure shareholders in February that the company was allocating chips “fairly.”
Nvidia's stock price has soared thanks to this demand, soaring 150% in the past 12 months and 92% year-to-date. On Wednesday, the company's stock topped $1,000 per share for the first time following an impressive quarterly report.
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 preparing for our next wave of growth. Blackwell's platform is fully operational and forms the foundation of trillion-parameter scale generative AI,” Huang said on the earnings call.
