Nvidia has swung from fourth to first place in an assessment of chip industry revenue published today. Taipei-based financial analyst Dan Nystedt noted that the green team took the revenue crown from contract chip-making titan TSMC as Q3 financials came into view.Those keeping an eye on the world of investing and finance will have seen our report about Nvidia’s earnings explosion, evidenced by the firm’s publishing of its Q3 FY23 results. Nvidia charted an amazing performance, with a headlining $18.12 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 206% year-over-year (YoY). The firm’s profits were also through the roof, and Nystedt posted a graph showing Nvidia elbowed past its chip industry rivals by this metric in Q3 2023, too.

Nvidia’s advance is supported by multiple highly successful operating segments, which have provided a multiplicative effect on its revenue and income. Again, we saw clear evidence of a seismic shift in revenue, with the latest set of financials shared with investors earlier this week.

While chip industry rivals like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel have all enjoyed some degree of progress through 2023 (in both revenue and income terms), you can clearly see the Midas effect of having multiple business divisions working to supply a range of incredibly tech-thirsty AI markets.

Nvidia’s Data Center business is its rising star, though we have seen impressive gains across most of its businesses since this time last year. It is asking more and more of TSMC to make the chips that power accelerated AI data centers. However, due to its valuable IP, Nvidia’s revenue and profit per chip will be much more impressive than what TSMC makes per chip on the production side.  We are seeing Nvidia enjoying great times now, but perhaps TSMC will come back, following the old fable that tells us ‘slow and steady wins the race.’ 

Notably, this total revenue number includes a range of Nvidia other companies' services, such as software licensing. Samsung has also suffered due to the precipitous decline in the memory market, highlighting that multiple factors impact the total revenue values. 

It will be fascinating to check back in a year to see how these famous four chip industry rivals are faring relative to one another.

By Mark Tyson