Nvidia shares surged more than 11% to a new high

Nvidia shares surged more than 11% to a new high as the chip maker topped Wall Street expectations with another quarter of record sales and said it expects data-center sales to keep outpacing gaming sales.

In the third quarter, gaming sales rose 42% to a record $3.22 billion, surpassing last quarter’s previous high mark of $3.05 billion, while analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected Nvidia gaming sales of $3.13 billion.

On the data-center side, sales rose increased 55% to a record $2.94 billion up from a previous high mark of $2.37 billion from the year-ago period, while analysts expected sales of $2.75 billion. On the conference call, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said half of those sales were to cloud and cloud-service providers, with the other half coming from businesses spanning various industries.

Much in the way of the third-quarter results, Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, said on the call that the company expects data-center sales to grow faster sequentially than gaming in the fourth quarter. A little more than a year ago, sales of data-center chips surpassed gaming sales for the first time, but that soon switched back.

Kress told MarketWatch in an interview that while the data-center opportunity in front of the company is “quite large,” there are still opportunities in gaming.

“They’re both important: It’s not like one child is better than the other, we adore both children,” Kress told MarketWatch.

Nvidia reported third-quarter net income of $2.46 billion, or 97 cents a share, compared with $1.34 billion, or 53 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted earnings, which exclude stock-based compensation expenses and other items, were $1.17 a share, compared with 73 cents a share in the year-ago period.

Revenue soared to a record $7.1 billion, up 50% from $4.73 billion in the year-ago quarter. Analysts had estimated adjusted earnings of $1.11 a share on revenue of $6.82 billion. Nvidia executives forecasted revenue between $6.66 billion to $6.94 billion in August.

For the fourth, or current, quarter, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker forecast revenue of $7.25 billion to $7.55 billion, while analysts surveyed by FactSet have forecast revenue of $6.89 billion on average.

Addressing capacity shortages, Huang said Nvidia had a “spectacular” amount of foundry capacity “particularly starting the second half of this year and going forward.”

“Last year was a wake-up call for everybody to be much more mindful about taking supply chain for granted and we were fortunate to have such good partners,” Huang said on the call.

Recently, the U.K. said it was conducting an in-depth investigationof Nvidia’s plans to acquired Arm Ltd. In the U.S., the company said it was also working with the Federal Trade Commission to address concerns raised by the $40 billion deal.

The earnings report follows Nvidia’s GTC event last week,in which the company unveiled several new AI products to give developers the tools they need to build out virtual worlds in the so-called metaverse.