Shares of Nvidia surged more than 10 percent in after-hours trade Thursday after the chipmaker posted better-than-expected profits and sales.

Nvidia reported fiscal third-quarter 2017 earnings per share of 83 cents on revenue of $2 billion. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast profits of 57 cents per share on sales of $1.69 billion. The company also increased its quarterly dividend by 22 percent to 14 cents per share and increased its buyback program by $2 billion.

Jen-Hsun Huang, the company's founder and chief executive officer, said "We had a breakout quarter - record revenue, record margins and record earnings were driven by strength across all product lines."



"Our new Pascal GPUs are fully ramped and enjoying great success in gaming, VR, self-driving cars and datacenter AI computing," he said.

As of Thursday's close, Nvidia was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 year-to-date, up 105.6 percent.

NVDA in 2016

Source: FactSet