San Jose (dpa)

US chip designer and software specialist Nvidia on Wednesday reported record quarterly revenue of $35.1 billion, up 17 percent from the second quarter and a 94 percent increase year on year thanks to the booming artificial intelligence market.

Profit was up to $19.3 billion, or $0.78 per share, in the third quarter, more than doubling the $9.2 billion, or $0.37 per share, reported a year earlier.

Despite the positive results, investors had hoped for an even better forecast for the current quarter and the company's shares fell by around 2 percent in after-hours US trading.

Nvidia's chip systems are used around the world to train applications using artificial intelligence. Heavyweights such as Google and the Meta group use them to fill entire data centres - but AI start-ups such as the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, also rely on them.

This key position allows Nvidia's business to continue to grow. Nvidia's revenue from data centre technology shot up by 112 percent to $30.8 billion year-on-year, exceeding analysts' expectations. 

In the current quarter, Nvidia plans to launch the first systems with the new Blackwell AI chip. At the same time, the group warned that demand for both Blackwell processors and the current generation, known as Hopper, would exceed supply for several quarters.


Nvidia predicted revenue of $37.5 billion for the current quarter, plus or minus 2%.

This was roughly in line with market expectations. Excluding items, Nvidia reported adjusted earnings of $20 billion, or $0.81 per share, for the period.

Analysts on average had expected the company to earn $0.75 per share, according to figures compiled by Thomson Reuters. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

The company's revenue for the quarter rose 93.6 percent to $35 billion from $18.1 billion last year.

"The age of AI is in full steam, propelling a global shift to NVIDIA computing," said founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang.

"Demand for Hopper and anticipation for Blackwell - in full production - are incredible as foundation model makers scale pretraining, post-training and inference."

"AI is transforming every industry, company and country. Enterprises are adopting agentic AI to revolutionize workflows. Industrial robotics investments are surging with breakthroughs in physical AI. And countries have awakened to the importance of developing their national AI and infrastructure."