NVIDIA is growing faster than you think. This table proves it.

Like clockwork Nvidia (NVDA 2.15%) posted another explosive growth in its third-quarter earnings report, but investors appeared to have missed the most impressive part of the results. The company did not mention this in any earnings call or press release, but instead placed it in the “CFO Comments” section of its earnings report.

By now, most investors know that the data center segment is the driving force behind Nvidia’s growth. While Nvidia’s business spans everything from games to autonomous vehicles to visualization tools like Omniverse, its success in the data center business, fueled by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, has overshadowed the narrative and now makes up the vast majority of Nvidia’s revenue.

While total revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 jumped 94% year-over-year to $35.1 billion, growth in the data center segment was even stronger, rising 112% year-over-year to $30.8 billion.

However, Nvidia divides its data center revenue into two categories. It generates revenue from “networking” and “computing”. Compute resources refer to the components that run applications on the server, such as processors and memory chips. The network includes components such as switches and routers that provide the connectivity and security needed to run applications.

AI training and inference are driven by computing components, so it makes sense that computing makes up the bulk of that revenue. Third-quarter network data center revenue rose just 20% year-over-year to $3.1 billion, while data center computing revenue rose 132% to $27.6 billion.

Data center computing performance looks like the best reflection of Nvidia’s underlying business growth, even despite the mismatch between supply and demand, as the company said several times in its earnings report that the business is supply constrained and expects those constraints to continue for for a long time. the next few blocks, especially on the Blackwell platform.

Data center computing revenue also grew 22% sequentially, topping the company-wide 17% sequential growth. and 17% sequential growth in data centers. The chart below shows data center computing revenue performance over the past few quarters.

Source: NVIDIA documents. (Note: Computing revenue was not reported for FY2024)

The data center computing platform is at the heart of Nvidia’s artificial intelligence offering. It accelerates the most demanding compute workloads and includes a wide range of products such as APIs, software development kits (SDKs), DGX Cloud, which is an AI training platform as a service, as well as GPUs, DPUs, and enterprise artificial intelligence software. All of this makes competing with Nvidia very difficult and helps explain why the data center business is growing so quickly.

Revenue growth picks up pace

Another telling point in the table above is that while Nvidia’s year-over-year revenue growth in its data center segment continued to slow, sequential revenue growth, which is perhaps the best barometer of growth, accelerated from 17% to 22%. , resulting in a similar acceleration in total revenue from 15% to 17%.

Consecutive growth of 22% would translate into 122% year-over-year growth if the business grows at that rate for four quarters. Given the launch of Blackwell’s new platform and management’s comments that demand will outpace supply over the next few quarters, the company should be able to maintain growth rates similar to those seen over the next year.

What’s next for NVIDIA

Nvidia shares fell slightly after the earnings report. Investors appeared to find the outlook disappointing as the company called for year-on-year revenue growth to slow to 70% in the fourth quarter, with revenue reaching $37.5 billion, give or take 2%.

However, Nvidia has a long history of beating its forecasts, and it looks like it’s a good bet to do so again in the fourth quarter, given the rapid growth of its data center computing business and robust demand for its Blackwell platform.

Don’t be surprised if Nvidia beats this forecast again in three months. Business is on fire. He continues to deliver stellar results and nothing can slow him down.

Jeremy Bowman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.