No more games
On Monday, we previewed the Nvidia results, modestly skeptical as to whether the best-performing stock in the entire S&P 500 Index would be able to live up to the lofty forecasts investors had for the company's upcoming quarterly results.
The report ended up blowing all expectations out of the water, reporting $13.5bn in revenue — double what the company had notched a year earlier, and 123% more than it had managed in the final 3 months of last year. That single quarter of revenue, driven by rampant demand for GPUs involved in large-language machine learning models, is more than the company had managed in all of 2020.
Right place, right time
It's hard to think of parallels for Nvidia's crazy year to put it into context, but Google sprung to mind (perhaps because we were just writing about it). However, even Google's stunning growth in the early 2000s hasn't matched Nvidia's pace. Indeed, on a relative basis, Zoom's lockdown-induced boom was the only revenue surge that we found more impressive than Nvidia's recent growth, with the video-conferencing company seeing a 253% jump in revenue in just 6 months.
Accounting for sheer size, Pfizer's boost from the development of its Covid-19 vaccine was comparable. The pharma company grew 66% in two quarters, adding $9.5bn in revenue. That said, demand for Covid vaccines ended up being (somewhat) temporary — AI looks like it's here to stay.
