The boss of the world's most valuable chip maker Nvidia says artificial intelligence (AI) is at a “tipping point” as it announced record sales.
Chief executive Jensen Huang's comments came as the technology giant posted record figures for the most recent quarter, after revenues surged by 265% to $22bn (£17.4bn) from a year earlier. It also said revenues for the year as a whole had more than doubled to $60.9bn. Nvidia's shares jumped by more than 9% in extended New York trading.
“Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point,” Mr Huang said in a statement.
“Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” he added. Nvidia also forecast a 233% jump in its quarterly revenues for the current quarter, beating analysts' estimates.
“There was a lot riding on this last quarter and they actually absolutely knocked it out of the park,” Bob O'Donnell of Technalysis Research told the BBC.
“We're starting to see mainstream usage of AI,” he added, highlighting that AI is not longer only used by specialised technology companies.
In addition to its AI chips, sales at the firm's data centres have grown rapidly. Its data centre business contributed the vast majority of its revenues in the most recent quarter after growing more than than five-fold over the last year.
However, the company said it faced several challenges including constraints on its supply chains. The US has also tightened its restrictions on trade with China, the world's second largest economy.
AI's public profile has risen sharply since the launch in 2022 of ChatGPT, which was developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. ChatGPT and other similar systems use huge amounts of data to create convincing human-like responses to user queries.
They are expected to dramatically change the way people search for information online. Nvidia's stock market value has soared by 225% over the last year, making it one of the most valuable companies in the US.
— CutC by bbc.com
