Dive Brief:

• Generative artificial intelligence is driving “exponential growth” in the computing market, the CFO of NVIDIA said Wednesday, as the chipmaker reported a surge in quarterly revenues.

• Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA reported total revenues of $7.19 billion for its fiscal 2024 first quarter ending April 30, up 19% from the prior three-month period.

• “Generative AI is driving exponential growth in compute requirements and a fast transition to NVIDIA accelerated computing,” NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress said during an earnings call Wednesday.

Dive Insight:

The revenue bump, which triggered a technology rally in the stock market according to CNBC, comes on the heels of NVIDIA’s announcement on Tuesday that it has formed an AI partnership with Microsoft.

“With the coming wave of generative AI applications, enterprises are seeking secure accelerated tools and services that drive innovation,” Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA, said in a press release. “The combination of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and Azure Machine Learning will help enterprises speed up their AI initiatives with a straight, efficient path from development to production.”

AI has grabbed the attention of business leaders and the public at large in recent months following the launch of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s generative AI tool known as ChatGPT, which can answer complex questions, draft essays and poems, and write software code, among other capabilities.

During an earnings call last month, Microsoft executives credited generative AI investments with boosting the company’s cloud business. The software giant reported $28.5 billion in cloud revenue for the three-month period ending March 31, up 22% year over year.

The emerging technology’s potential was also a dominant theme in recent earnings calls held by competing cloud service providers Google and Amazon. 

During NVIDIA’s latest earnings call, Kress said enterprise demand for AI and accelerated computing is strong. 

“We are seeing momentum in verticals such as automotive, financial services, healthcare, and telecom, where AI and accelerated computing are quickly becoming integral to customers' innovation roadmaps and competitive positioning,” she said. Auto insurance company CCC Intelligent Solutions is using AI for estimating repairs, and AT&T is leveraging it to improve fleet dispatches, for example, the finance chief added.

Looking ahead, the chipmaker is projecting total revenues of $11 billion for its next quarter.