NVIDIA ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang isn’t short on demand. What he lacked was supply.
In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance following the company’s first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Huang pushed back against concerns that demand could face a slowdown as the company transitions between its current and next-generation AI chips.
“People want to use these data centers right away,” Huang said. “They want to keep ours [graphics processing units] Start working and earning money now and start saving money. So that demand is very strong.”
Nvidia is switching from its current Hopper AI platform to its advanced Blackwell system. Ahead of the company’s results on Wednesday, some analysts on Wall Street raised questions about whether some customers would be more wary of hopper orders than more Blackwell units later this year.
“The fact that hopper demand grew throughout this quarter — after we announced Blackwell — tells you how much that kind of demand is there,” Huang said.
Huang added that demand for the two platforms will exceed supply next year, with the complexity of these chips challenging the company’s efforts to keep pace.
“Every component, every part of our data center is the most complex computer ever built in the world,” Huang said. “So it’s prudent to have almost everything regulated.”
In the first quarter, Nvidia topped Wall Street estimates, with adjusted earnings per share reaching $6.12 on revenue of $26 billion, up 461% and 262%, respectively, from a year earlier. Non-GAAP operating income rose to $18.1 billion in the first quarter.
For the current quarter, Nvidia expects revenue to reach $28 billion, or minus 2%. That was better than the $26.6 billion analysts were expecting.
The company announced a 10-for-1 stock split — where shareholders will get 10 shares for every share of the company they currently own — effective June 7 for shareholders starting June 10.
Nvidia also joined its big tech peers in raising its quarterly dividend, with shareholders now set to receive a dividend of $0.10 per share, up from $0.04.
Nvidia shares rose 9% in early trading Thursday.
Huang also discussed how Nvidia will lead the shift from AI training, where companies train AI models, to AI inference, where the same companies deploy the models for use by customers.
Questions have swirled about whether big cloud providers like Microsoft ( MSFT ), Google ( GOOG , GOOGL ) and Amazon ( AMZN ) will ditch Nvidia’s chips in favor of their own offerings.
But Huang sees Nvidia’s offerings as powerful for inference as they are for training.
“We have a big position on inference, because inference is a very complex problem,” he said.
“The software stack is complex. The type of models people are using is complex. Most of the inference today is done at Nvidia. So, we expect that to continue.”
The CEO touched on the company’s growth in customer sales beyond major cloud service providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and said Nvidia is increasingly being bought by companies ranging from Meta ( META ) and Tesla ( TSLA ) to pharmaceutical companies. Chives. In fact, excluding cloud companies, the largest industry uses Nvidia’s data-center chip. is a vehicle.
“Tesla is very far ahead in self-driving cars,” Huang said. “But every car, someday we have to have autonomous capability.”
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