Good day, and welcome to the NVIDIA 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I would now like to turn the conference over to Simona Jankowski. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to NVIDIA's 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I'm Simona Jankowski, Vice President of Investor Relations. We're hosting a fully virtual annual meeting again this year. As a reminder, the rules of conduct for the meeting are posted on our virtual meeting website. We ask that you follow them to help the meeting run smoothly. Other members of NVIDIA's management who are on the line with me today are Jensen Huang, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director; Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Timothy Teter, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary. I would also like to introduce the outside members of our board who are in attendance: Rob Burgess, Tench Coxe, John Dabiri, Persis Drell, Dawn Hudson, Harvey Jones, Melissa Lora, Steve Neal, Brooke Seawell, Aarti Shah, and Mark Stevens.
Finally, I would like to introduce Sarah Beillard from PricewaterhouseCoopers, our independent registered public accounting firm. After the formal portion of the meeting and Jensen's business update, we will set aside some time for questions. I will now turn the meeting over to Tim.
Thanks, Simona. Good morning, and welcome to our 2024 Annual Meeting, which will now officially come to order. Jensen will serve as Chairman, and I will serve as the Secretary and conduct the procedural portion of the meeting. First, a few housekeeping items. We have opened the online portal for stockholders to vote their shares, and I'll make an announcement when the polls are about to be closed. Stockholders may ask questions during the meeting. If you have a question, please enter it into the portal. As stated in our rules of conduct, the meeting is not to be used as a forum to present general, economic, political, or other views that are not directly related to our business, the business of the meeting, or for matters of individual concern. In fairness to all attendees, we will limit each stockholder to one question.
We may provide a single response to multiple questions generally asking the same or similar things. After the conclusion of the meeting, we will publish the questions, if pertinent to NVIDIA's business or the business of the meeting, along with our responses on our Investor Relations website. During this meeting, we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the reports we may file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly report on Form 10-Q.
All of our statements are made as of June 26, 2024, based on information available to us as of today, and except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update them. We will address the matters described in our proxy statement dated May 14, 2024. Following Jensen's business update, the polls will be closed. We'll announce preliminary voting results, and then the official portion of the meeting will be adjourned. I have a complete list of the stockholders of record of NVIDIA's common stock on the April 29, 2024, record date for this meeting. I also have an affidavit from Broadridge certifying that they commenced the mailing of proxy materials on May 14, 2024. I am appointing Chris Woods of American Election Services, LLC, to act as the inspector of elections at this meeting. He will tally the final votes when balloting on all matters is completed.
Chris has taken the customary oath of office, and we will file this oath with the records of the meeting. The presence, in person or by proxy, of a majority of the shares entitled to vote at the meeting will constitute a quorum. There were approximately 2.5 billion shares outstanding on a pre-stock split basis on the record date, and Chris has informed me that proxies have been received for approximately 1.9 billion shares, or approximately 79% of the shares outstanding, which constitutes a quorum for today's meeting. Each share of common stock is entitled to one vote. If you are eligible to vote and have not submitted your proxy, or if you want to change your vote, please vote online now. You do not need to vote if you have already sent in your signed proxy or voted online or by telephone. Your votes will be counted automatically.
The time is 9:05 A.M., and the polls are currently open for voting. There are four items of business for this meeting. First, the election of Robert K. Burgess, Tench Coxe, John E. Dabiri, Persis S. Drell, Jensen Huang, Dawn E. Hudson, Harvey C. Jones, Melissa Lora, Stephen C. Neal, Brooke Seawell, Aarti S. Shah, and Mark A. Stevens to serve as directors until our 2025 Annual Meeting. Second, the approval of the compensation of our named executive officers for fiscal 2024, as disclosed in our proxy statement. Third, the ratification of PwC as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2025. And fourth, the approval of a stockholder proposal to replace the supermajority voting provisions in our charter and bylaws with a simple majority voting standard. At this time, we would like to introduce John Chevedden to present his proposal. Mr. Chevedden, you have three minutes. Please begin.
Hello, this is John Chevedden. Proposal for a simple majority vote. Chair's request to the board of directors take the necessary steps so that each voting requirement in the charter and bylaws that calls for a greater than simple majority vote be replaced by a requirement for a majority of the shares voted for and against such proposals, or a simple majority. This includes making the necessary changes in plain English. Shareholders are willing to pay a premium for shares of companies that have excellent corporate governance. Supermajority voting requirements have been found to be one of six entrenching mechanisms that are negatively related to company performance, according to What Matters in Corporate Governance by Lucian Bebchuk of the Harvard Law School. Supermajority requirements can be used to block initiatives supported by most shareholders but opposed by status quo management.
This proposal topic went from 74% - 88% support at Weyerhaeuser, Alcoa, Waste Management, Goldman Sachs, FirstEnergy, and Macy's. These votes would have been higher than 74% - 88% if small shareholders had access to independent proxy voting advice. This proposal also received overwhelming 98% support at the 2023 Annual Meeting of American Airlines and the Carlyle Group. The board of directors is not opposed to this proposal, which should open the floodgates for shareholders to vote in favor. The board of directors has no good reason to have any reservation about supporting this proposal. According to the board of directors' statement next to this proposal, the only reason to maintain the present seven-prong 67% shareholder approval requirements is to avoid a situation that is highly unlikely to occur. That is, a large number of NVIDIA shareholders failing to vote at the annual meeting.
Plus, the board of directors is already in a powerful position to make sure that such a highly unlikely situation, a large number of NVIDIA shareholders failing to vote at the annual meeting, will never occur should there be the slightest hint that it might occur. Please vote yes, simple majority vote proposal for.
Thank you, Mr. Chevedden. As the company has not received notice from any of its stockholders of any other matter to be considered at today's meeting, no other proposals will be addressed. If you have not voted and intend to vote, or if you want to change your vote, please do so online now. Proxies, votes, or any changes or revocations submitted after the closing of the polls will not be accepted. I'll turn it over to Jensen for a business update, following which we will announce the preliminary results of the meeting and then answer stockholder questions.
Thanks, Tim. Accelerated computing and AI are the most consequential technologies of our time. Modern computing started 60 years ago with the IBM System/360. The basic principles of its general-purpose computing architecture still govern today's computer industry. For nearly a decade, as the performance scaling of general-purpose processing has slowed while computing demand continued, an exponentially growing performance-to-demand deficit has built up. If unchecked, this computing energy and cost inflation will stifle every industry. NVIDIA's accelerated computing has stepped in to the breach to meet the exponentially growing computing deficit. After two decades of work to reinvent the entire computing stack, NVIDIA Accelerated Computing has created a path forward at just the right time. NVIDIA Accelerated Computing has been described as a time machine for scientists to see the future, an instrument of discovery for the da Vincis and Einsteins of our time.
From NVIDIA Accelerated Computing emerged generative AI. The result of over a decade and billions of dollars of investment, NVIDIA has made possible, for the first time, the production of our most valuable resource: intelligence. Like the AC generation plants invented by Nikola Tesla, NVIDIA's supercomputers are AI generation plants or AI factories. We've started a new industrial revolution to mass-produce digital intelligence. To seize this generational opportunity, companies and countries around the world are building NVIDIA-powered AI factories to process, refine, and manufacture intelligence from data. Intelligence in the form of digital tokens is a new kind of commodity, a new product, and it will create new revenue opportunities for the world's $100 trillion of industries. For the computer industry, generative AI represents a fundamental shift. Every layer of the computing stack is being reinvented.
Where we once wrote software programs to execute explicit instructions, now we prompt large language models with our intentions. Computers are now intention-driven rather than instruction-driven. Tell a computer what you want, and it will figure out how to accomplish this goal. A complete reinvention of our industry, from how computers are designed to how software is developed to what software can do, will expand the horizons of every industry. A new industrial revolution has begun. Soon, every industry will be transformed. The historic nature of this moment is evident in our numbers. For FY24, revenue was up 126% to a record $60.9 billion. GAAP-diluted earnings --per share pre-split was $11.93, up 586% from a year ago. Demand for Hopper architecture products remains strong, and Blackwell, its successor, has been broadly adopted by the industry.
By customer demand, ecosystem adoption, and bookings, the Blackwell architecture platform will likely be the most successful product in our history and even for the entire computer history. Full-year gaming revenue rose 15% to $10.4 billion on strong demand for our GeForce RTX GPU. Full-year revenue for professional visualization rose 1% to $1.6 billion. Automotive full-year revenue rose 21% to $1.1 billion. NVIDIA Accelerated Computing has reached a tipping point and achieved a virtuous cycle. The significant CUDA install base attracts developers and applications, which attract resellers reaching customers, which expands the install base to attract more developers. CUDA, our parallel computing model, sits at the heart. It offers developers an unparalleled toolkit with over 300 libraries, 600 AI models, numerous SDKs, and supports 3,700 GPU-accelerated applications.
This has resulted in a rich ecosystem that spans more than 5 million developers and 40,000 companies and thousands of generative AI companies building on NVIDIA. Accelerated computing is incredibly fast, but not quick to adopt. It has taken NVIDIA over 20 years to reach the CUDA tipping point. Applications must be rewritten to suit the new architecture and complex algorithms embedded in our CUDA libraries. Here are some examples of the hundreds of CUDA libraries. cuDNN, our renowned deep learning library, provides optimized kernels that accelerate neural network computations. Aerial, our CUDA engine for 5G radio access networks, is paving the way for a software-defined and AI-driven telecom industry. cuLitho addresses the computational challenges in lithography, the critical stage of chip manufacturing. Accelerated computing is sweeping across healthcare as digital biology and generative AI revolutionize drug discovery, surgery, medical imaging, wearable devices, and patient care.
Our partners include Amgen, Genentech, Johnson & Johnson MedTech, Medtronic, and hundreds of startups transforming healthcare into one of the world's largest tech industries. Just one example, our Parabricks CUDA library streamlines gene sequencing alignment and variant calling, offering the highest throughput in gene sequencing. In climate science, NVIDIA CorrDiff powers Earth-2, a digital twin that emulates Earth's weather and climate systems. CorrDiff is NVIDIA's generative AI model that predicts weather patterns 12x higher in resolution, from 25 km to 2 km, and 3,000x more energy efficiently than traditional physical simulation methods. Accelerated computing is sustainable computing. Every application that can be accelerated should be going forward. CUDA libraries activate NVIDIA Accelerated Computing for new application domains and open new markets and growth opportunities for our partner ecosystem. The world's trillion dollars of data centers should be modernized with accelerated computing.
This year, we launched some of the most important products in our history. This is Blackwell. It starts with the most advanced GPU designed for trillion-parameter scale generative AI and our fifth-generation NVLink, which connects up to 576 Blackwell GPUs into one super GPU, up from just 8 Hopper GPUs. Compared to previous generation Hopper, Blackwell can train large language models with only a quarter of the GPUs and a quarter of the energy, showcasing a 25x reduction in cost of ownership and energy consumption when inferencing frontier large language models. NVIDIA's offering starts with the most advanced GPU, but an AI factory is much more, combining Blackwell GPUs, NVLink, Grace CPUs, Quantum and Spectrum-X switches, and a rich ecosystem of software systems and data center partners.
The Blackwell platform will be adopted by every major cloud service provider, server maker, and leading AI companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and xAI. PC users have always been able to get the software they needed quickly and easily. Now, we're introducing a new way to distribute AI models. We call this new capability NVIDIA Inference Microservices, or NIMs. NIMs deliver enterprise-grade optimized generative AI that runs on CUDA everywhere, from the cloud to on-prem data centers to RTX AI PCs, through our expansive network of ecosystem partners. NIMs integrate CUDA libraries, optimized inference engines, industry-standard APIs, and AI model support into containers for straightforward deployment. These containerized pre-trained AI-in-a-box microservices enable enterprises across all industries to evolve into AI-driven companies. Adobe, Cadence, CrowdStrike, Getty Images, SAP, ServiceNow, Shutterstock, and others were among the first to access NIMs.
More than 250 technology and platform providers are embedding NIMs into their services. In healthcare, NIMs are already powering foundation models in drug discovery, medical imaging, and genomics. The next wave of AI is set to automate the $50 trillion in heavy industries. Soon, robotics factories will orchestrate robots that build products that are robotic. We developed Omniverse, a revolutionary virtual world simulation platform where the physical and digital world converge for developers to create robotic systems. Within Omniverse, industrial companies design, integrate, simulate, and operate digital twins of robotic systems, like factories, robots, and products. Omniverse is pioneering an open standard, open Universal Scene Description format to seamlessly integrate industry-leading tools from design to manufacturing, allowing companies to create comprehensive digital twins that optimize the entire production lifecycle. Self-driving cars are kind of a robot.
The automotive industry has been an early adopter of NVIDIA Omniverse as it seeks to digitalize its entire workflow, from design to build, simulation and operation, and even experience its factories and cars virtually. The new era of manufacturing is coming. Thousands of new and established companies are building robots and robotic systems. These companies will have two factories: one to build the physical robots and another, an AI factory to manufacture the intelligence that drives them. Generative AI and robotics are opening new growth opportunities as well as driving a new level of productivity for the $50 trillion manufacturing industries. The next industrial revolution has begun. AI factories are producing a revolutionary commodity: tokens of digital intelligence. These AI factories are setting the stage for generative AI to become a multi-trillion dollar industry and transform every industry.
The rise of sovereign AI in countries like Japan, Canada, and France, among many others, is a testament to the universal recognition of the importance of developing one's own AI capabilities adapted for each nation's language and culture. Just 12 years after AlexNet, which was trained on two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs, stunned the computing world and ignited the Big Bang of modern AI, we are now beginning to realize the immense transformative potential before us. No one knew how far deep learning would take us. No one knew how far it would scale. I want to take this opportunity to thank the many researchers and scientists and developers, ecosystem partners, customers, and employees who dedicated themselves to explore what was a $0 billion market with us. We've reinvented NVIDIA, the computer industry, and very likely the world.
Thanks, Jensen.
The time is 9:23 A.M., and the polls are now closed. The preliminary report of the inspector of elections covering the proposals presented at this meeting is as follows. First, each of the 12 director nominees on the ballot has been elected to serve until our 2025 annual meeting and until his or her successor is elected or appointed. Proposal two to approve the fiscal 2024 compensation of our named executive officers as disclosed in our proxy statement has been approved. Proposal three to ratify PwC as NVIDIA's independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2025 has been approved. Proposal four to approve a stockholder proposal to replace the supermajority voting provisions in our charter and bylaws with a simple majority voting standard has been approved.
A full tally of the votes will be published in a Form 8-K, which we expect to file with the SEC within four business days. That concludes the formal portion of today's annual meeting, and I now declare the official portion of the meeting adjourned. I'll turn it over to Simona for stockholder questions.
Thanks, Tim. We'll now move to Q&A. We grouped together duplicative questions that we received to streamline the discussion. For our first question, Jensen, can you discuss NVIDIA's strategy for maintaining its competitive edge? What are your thoughts on the threat of other players in the industry developing competitive products?
Over a decade ago, we envisioned a new opportunity and dove into deep learning, systematically reinventing everything: the GPUs, the interconnects, the systems, the networking, and of course, the software. We invested billions pushing into the unknown, extending the frontier of computing technology.
Thousands of engineers have worked for a decade on deep learning, advancing and scaling without knowing how far we could take the technology. We transformed our company end-to-end to become a full-stack data center scale AI systems and platform company. Today, we continue to push the frontiers of accelerated computing and AI. Our competitive advantage is our expertise, scale, and velocity to create the most advanced and end-to-end optimized AI computing systems, create new markets for them, and attract the world's developers while delivering extraordinary value to our customers. NVIDIA offers customers the lowest total cost of ownership through exceptional performance delivered by innovations at every layer of the stack, from chips to systems to software and algorithms.
The NVIDIA platform is broadly available through every major cloud provider and computer maker, creating a large and attractive install base for developers and customers, which makes our platform more valuable to our customers. NVIDIA has achieved a virtuous cycle. For our next question, what are NVIDIA's plans for quantum computing development? Practical quantum computing is still a couple of decades away, and when it arrives, computing algorithms will be a combination of accelerated and quantum approaches. NVIDIA CUDA Quantum is a platform for quantum computing and algorithm researchers to solve challenges on the road to useful quantum computing. We're partnering with the entire ecosystem, from the development of quantum algorithms, the design of higher fidelity qubits, the development of novel error correction techniques, to the calibration and optimal control of quantum devices. NVIDIA's CUDA Quantum is an essential platform for the quantum computing community.
Though no one knows which qubit technology will end up in useful quantum computers, NVIDIA's role in powering them is certain. NVIDIA is not building a quantum computer. We're building the platform essential for all quantum computers. Thank you. Our next question is, what is the company's diversification strategy, particularly into the pharmaceutical industry? NVIDIA is an accelerated computing platform company. We address multiple industries, from healthcare to automotive, manufacturing, financial services, energy, retail, gaming, and many others, through a combination of our hardware systems and domain-specific software stacks and a rich ecosystem of partners and developers. AI has sparked the next industrial revolution. It will transform every industry. Innovation in healthcare, drug discovery in particular, will be supercharged by generative AI. For the first time, we can represent and understand the meaning of the two things that describe drugs: biology and chemistry in a computer.
This is paving the way for the rise of computer-aided drug discovery, which should help the pharmaceutical industry become more efficient and effective in finding drugs for specific diseases and even specific people someday. We have built many enabling components, including our BioNeMo generative AI platform for drug discovery and our Parabricks software for genomics, to make computer-aided drug discovery possible. And we're working with leaders in the field from Amgen to Genentech to Recursion, all of whom are already making rapid progress on the NVIDIA platform. Healthcare, automotive, and digital manufacturing are among the largest vertical industries we serve, with the highest potential for the impact that we make and the size of the opportunity. But the NVIDIA computing platform can support all $100 trillion worth of vertical industries worldwide, and we expect that to lead to increased diversification in the types of workloads and customers we serve.
Next, could you talk about our strategy to address the current semiconductor supply chain challenges? How does NVIDIA ensure a stable supply of semiconductors for its customers?
NVIDIA has the expertise and scale to develop a resilient supply chain. We will continue pursuing flexibility and redundancy in our supply chain, evaluating and quantifying multiple suppliers for components and processes that we use to build our products. In addition, we have strong relationships with our suppliers, and we may enter into long-term agreements to ensure supply and prepay for manufacturing or other key capacities.
What is NVIDIA doing to ensure that artificial intelligence has proper guardrails?
NVIDIA is actively shaping AI safety and ethics. We are members of safety initiatives in the U.S., E.U., and U.K.
We are at the forefront of standard-setting bodies like the IEEE and the Content Authenticity Initiative, crafting guidelines that will govern the AI landscape for generations to come. Our partnerships with state and federal agencies ensure that we together are thoughtfully and collaboratively addressing challenges like content safety, model risk mitigation, and data privacy protection. We have also developed and released trustworthy AI technologies, including NeMo Guardrails, an open-source tool for language models that allow developers and companies to control or prohibit prompts and outputs. We lead the industry in research and development of active safety computing systems and digital twin simulation platforms to ensure the safe functioning of robotic systems.
Thank you. Can you talk about the company's approach to corporate sustainability matters, including diversity and climate change?
Diversity and inclusion enhance innovation and empower our workforce.
We want to attract people who want to do their life's work at NVIDIA and tackle the world's toughest challenges and are committed to enhancing diversity in our company. Attracting and developing employees with diverse backgrounds and experiences is key to unlocking our full potential and creating groundbreaking products. NVIDIA is at the forefront of energy-efficient accelerated computing. General-purpose computing performance scaling has slowed. Customers are turning to NVIDIA-pioneered accelerated computing as the path to sustainable and cost-effective innovation. NVIDIA is modernizing the world's trillion-dollar data center industry and enabling applications to create remarkable new efficiencies and save incredible amounts of energy in every industry. Accelerated computing is sustainable computing.
Thank you, Jensen. We have now reached the time limit for the 2024 annual meeting, and our program has now concluded. A copy of this webcast will be available online on our website through June 25th, 2025.
We look forward to another great year at NVIDIA. Thank you for attending and for your continued support of NVIDIA. Our 2024 annual meeting is now closed.
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.