After the bell, Nvidia reported fiscal first-quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat expectations for sales and earnings, and provided a strong forecast for the current quarter.

Nvidia’s results have become a way for investors to gauge the strength of the AI boom that has transfixed markets in recent months. Its strong results on Wednesday suggest that demand for the AI chips Nvidia makes remains strong.

The stock rose over 3% in extended trading. Nvidia said it was splitting its stock 10 to 1.

Nvidia said it expected sales of $28 billion in the current quarter. Wall Street was expecting earnings per share of $5.95 on sales of $26.61 billion, according to LSEG.

Nvidia reported net income for the quarter of $14.88 billion, or $5.98 per share, compared with $2.04 billion, or 82 cents, in the year-ago period.

In the past year, Nvidia sales have skyrocketed as companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI buy billions of dollars of Nvidia’s GPUs, which are advanced and pricey chips required for developing and deploying artificial intelligence applications.

The company’s largest and most important business is its data center sales, which includes its AI chips as well as many of the additional parts needed to run big AI servers.

Nvidia said its data center category rose 427% from the year-ago quarter to $22.6 billion in revenue. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in a statement that it was due to shipments of the company’s “Hopper” graphics processors, which include the company’s H100 GPU.

“Large cloud providers continued to drive strong growth as they deploy and ramp NVIDIA AI infrastructure at scale, representing mid-40% of our Data Center revenue,” Kress said in the statement.

Even as the company reports a tripling or more of its business, CEO Jensen Huang said that the company’s next-generation AI GPU, called Blackwell, would lead to more growth.

″“We are poised for our next wave of growth,” Huang said in a statement. For more, read the full CNBC report.