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Nvidia finally had a quarter for the gamers again

Nvidia’s former cash cow posted record sales in the first quarter, carrying the company to a sales beat.

5/29/25 1:47PM

As the AI boom continues to, well, boom and Wall Street’s lofty expectations become harder to top, Nvidia found itself relying on an old friend to push it over the edge in its first quarter: gaming.

The AI chip giant beat sales expectations by $792 million, propelled almost entirely by its gaming division, which outperformed Wall Street’s consensus by 32%.

In fact, Nvidia gaming — the company’s golden goose for the first three-ish decades of its existence — posted record sales of $3.76 billion, up a whopping 42% year over year.

According to Nvidia, gaming’s boost was driven by sales of Blackwell architecture, chips used to boost game graphics through DLSS, a both loved and reviled tech that uses AI to render games in higher resolutions. Nvidia chips are also in the soon-to-launch Nintendo Switch 2.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: even at an all-time high, gaming revenue was just 8.5% of Nvidia’s overall sales on the quarter. That’s a far cry from early 2022, when the segment made up 45% of total revenue and ChatGPT was nearly a year away from launch. You’d think a division plunging from 45% of revenue to 8.5% in three years would represent disastrous performance, but in Nvidia’s case, it just represents getting leapfrogged by a massive AI boom.

Nvidia’s data center revenue has grown at about 10x the rate of gaming and is up more than 800% from the same quarter two years ago.

Still, that’s not to say the gaming division isn’t a beefy business in and of itself. At $3.76 billion, the segment posted higher sales figures than the most recent overall quarterly sales of companies like Keurig Dr Pepper, Ulta Beauty, and Chipotle. The division was just a few million dollars shy of the total revenue posted by fellow semiconductor company Texas Instruments.

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

OpenAI Anthropic ARR race — Sherwood News

A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”