What happened

Shares of NVIDIA (NVDA 3.53%) rose as much as 15.1% on Wednesday morning following the release of earnings for the first quarter of fiscal year 2018.

So what

In the first quarter, NVIDIA's adjusted earnings jumped 85% higher year over year to $0.85 per diluted share. Sales rose 48%, landing at $1.94 billion. Analysts would have settled for earnings of $0.67 per share on sales near $1.91 billion.

Digital rendering of car decked out in Nvidia logo graphics.

Image source: NVIDIA.

Now what

The Pascal graphics chip architecture, which NVIDIA introduced last year, keep driving the company to new heights. If the proof is in the pudding, NVIDIA is serving up plenty of tasty treats in recent quarters. The company has beaten Wall Street's earnings targets by an average of 21% in the last four reports, led by rampant growth in the automotive computing and data center segments.

"We saw growth across our 4 market platforms," said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. "AI is expanding. Datacenter nearly tripled. Large ISP, CSP deployments everywhere. PC gaming is still growing; eSports, AAA gaming titles, fueling our growth there. And we have great games on the horizon. Autonomous vehicles, becoming imperative on all sectors of transportation, as we talked about earlier."

Huang is not only excited about his company's growth prospects, but also able to list the reasons why at the drop of a hat.