Welcome back. Good Thursday morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining this morning. I'm Maria Bartiromo. It is Thursday, May 21, just before 7:00 a.m. on the button on the East Coast. The AI revolution is here, chip maker NVIDIA is at the center of it, reporting an 85% increase in revenue last night and a 92% increase in data center revenue last night in its first quarter release. I sat down with NVIDIA's founder and CEO Jensen Huang right after he released the numbers. He told me we are only at the beginning of a massive AI buildout with hyperscaler and agentic AI driving the next phase of growth. Watch.
Record sales and earnings from NVIDIA. The company posting a double beat in the first quarter earnings release, per share coming in at $1.87 a share, revenue at $81.62 billion. That's up 85% from a year earlier. CEO Jensen Huang saying AI data center buildout is the largest infrastructure expansion in human history, adding NVIDIA is uniquely positioned at the center of the transformation as the only platform that runs in every cloud, powers every frontier and open source model, and scales everywhere AI is produced from hyperscale data centers to the edge. Joining me with more on this demand for chips and infrastructure is the man himself, Jensen Huang. Thank you for being here.
Hi, Maria, great to see you.
Another incredible quarter, Jensen. $58 billion in net income for the quarter, three times more than a year ago. Can you tell us what drove the business this cycle?
The big thing that's going on, Maria, is that AI has gone from generative AI, which is really interesting, produces really interesting content, to now agentic AI. AI can now do work, productive work, valuable work. And as a result, these AI companies are generating tokens, which is basically the map of intelligence. They're generating tokens that are profitable, and when that happens, they want to generate a lot more tokens so they can increase their revenues. In this era, in the era of AI, compute is revenues and compute is profit. And so this is the transition that has happened recently. Agentic AI is now here, valuable AI is now here, productive AI is now here, and we're scaling all of these AI companies so that they can generate the revenues that is coming to them.
So Jensen, are you saying that it's gone way beyond the hyperscalers? We've been talking about all of the spending on AI from the likes of Microsoft and Google and Amazon and all of the large big tech companies. Are we beyond that? Are we still in the first inning of AI in that regard, or are you seeing a broadening out throughout corporate America right now in terms of spend?
We're seeing both of those happening at the same time. On the one hand, the hyperscalers are growing. In our case, some 80, 90% a year on a very large base. And so just notice, just think, we're growing in absolute dollars and at a percentage faster today than we were a year ago and a year before that. And so it's pretty incredible. So the hyperscalers are in the early innings of delivering, scaling out their capex, scaling out their AI factories, and scaling out their AI. Simultaneously, there are about 50%, 60% of our business, about something like that, about half of our business, because the other half of our business is industrial, enterprise, AI-native clouds, these regional cloud data centers around the world, all the way to sovereign AI clouds. And so both of these different segments of data centers are growing at the same time.
I want to ask you about that, because there are so many roads to growth and what you just said. How long is this runway, Jensen? Do you have visibility in terms of how long this runway goes, and where are you in this AI super cycle?
Well, the first thing is to take a step back and realize that AI has only recently started to do productive work. It's able to now do something productive for us, do something valuable. Just like people, there's people who know it all, and it's great that they know a lot of information, but that's not very productive, not very valuable. However, somebody who can get work done is highly valuable to companies and to society. And so AI has now finally become productive. We're at the beginning of the scale-out of AI, finally. We're kind of in, if you will, in the second inning. The first inning was getting AI, the technology, to be invented. We're in the second inning of that. It's very clear that through next year, through the next several years, the world is going to have more demand, far more demand than there will be supply. And it's going to be a couple of two, three years of catch-up. And then beyond that, we're going to scale AI from the cloud to enterprises to industrial, and that's physical AI or robotics. It's really where I think the largest industries will be impacted and really be benefited by AI. So that's several years away.
