GPU designer Nvidia beat Wall Street expectations for sales and earnings in the latest quarter, with record revenue of $26 billion.

That was up 262 percent on the same period last year. Data center-specific revenue hit $22.6bn, up 427 percent over last year and up 23 percent over last quarter, as artificial intelligence deployments continue to boost the company's bottom line.

"The next industrial revolution has begun — companies and countries are partnering with Nvidia to shift the trillion-dollar traditional data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center — AI factories — to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO.

“Our data center growth was fueled by strong and accelerating demand for generative AI training and inference on the Hopper platform. Beyond cloud service providers, generative AI has expanded to consumer Internet companies, and enterprise, sovereign AI, automotive and healthcare customers, creating multiple multibillion-dollar vertical markets."

The company also announced a ten-for-one forward stock split of Nvidia's issued common stock.

For the current quarter, Nvidia forecast total revenue of $28bn plus or minus two percent - also above analyst expectations.