Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Photo credit: Nvidia, under Creative Commons license

Chip company Nvidia just reported its financial results for the first quarter of this year, indicating a record of $1 billion in data center quarterly sales for the first time ever. During the quarter in total, Nvidia recorded roughly $3 billion in revenue, up 39% year-over-year. Also in the same quarter, Nvidia paid dividends of $98 million.

Record data center revenues look very good for Nvidia, as the segment is beginning to account for a larger slice of the company’s total sales. For long, most of Nvidia’s sales have originated from one segment, being gaming. Adding yet another segment in the form of data center sales will apparently boost investor confidence in Nvidia’s business prospects because as they say, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

Datacenter operators have long continued to push new chips into their servers to increase usage capabilities and Nvidia happens to produce a significant number of the chips used by such operators. The Santa Clara-based chipmaker has regularly released new and enhanced chip products targeted at datacenter usage. Notably, Nvidia is fresh off the acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-American company that makes networking products mainly for datacenter use. Nvidia paid a sizeable $7 billion for the company, indicating that it’s really doubling down on the datacenter market. Mellanox’s acquisition undoubtedly played a key role in boosting Nvidia’s datacenter revenues to a historical record.