Dive Brief:
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Soaring demand for AI drove another growth spurt for Nvidia during the fourth quarter, executives said Wednesday during an earnings call. The company saw revenues rise 73% year over year, reaching $68 billion.
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The company’s data center segment added a record $11 billion quarter over quarter, driven by demand from “a diverse and expanding set of customers including cloud providers, hyperscalers, AI model makers, enterprises and sovereign nations,” CFO Colette Kress said during the call for the period ending Jan. 25.
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Buoyed by the ramped-up delivery of its Blackwell architecture platform, Nvidia wrapped up a record fiscal year, reaching full-year revenue of $215 billion, up 65% year over year.
Dive Insight:
As CIOs raced to deploy AI tools and hyperscalers built out massive data centers to meet demand, Nvidia cashed in as the leading provider of AI-ready infrastructure in 2025.
The GPU maker leapt to the top of the global semiconductor market last year, surpassing Samsung Electronics and claiming more than 15% of spending in the nearly $800 billion market, Gartner estimated.
Demand for AI services is expected to keep the semiconductor market humming, as AI will account for more than half of the market by 2029, according to Gartner projections.
Amid the push for AI, constraints in supply is one headwind the provider plans to track in its fiscal 2027.
“While we expect tightness in the supply for our advanced architectures to persist, we remain confident in our ability to capitalize on the growth opportunity ahead with our scale, expansive supply chain and long-standing partnerships continuing to serve us well,” Kress said.
The provider’s blockbuster results track with a cloud spending surge among enterprises last year. Hyperscalers raked in nearly $120 billion from cloud services during the final quarter of 2025, according to Synergy Research Group.
“Nvidia once again exceeded expectations and, with billions more in CapEx planned by the hyperscalers this year, demand for Nvidia’s chips remains robust," said Emarketer Analyst Jacob Bourne, in an email to CIO Dive.
For CIOs, the AI compute frenzy is having a knock-on effect: driving up costs for other types of hardware.
“Nvidia’s earnings acceleration keeps the AI dream alive and ensures that a technology supply chain already bursting at the gills will continue chugging along for the foreseeable future,” said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, in an email to CIO Dive. “Accelerated GPU demand, however, also places constraints on the associated server components like CPUs and memory.”
Constraints in memory supply and the associated rising costs will lead worldwide PC shipments to dip by more than 10% this year, Gartner projected.
“This means no relief is in sight for skyrocketing commodity components for PCs, servers or networking gear,” Bickley said. “Making a strategic purchase now may prove quite prudent a year from now in hindsight.”
