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CNN
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Nvidia once again beat Wall Street’s expectations when it reported earnings on Wednesday. But for a company that’s been on a stunning growth streak over the past two years, merely great numbers may no longer be enough to impress investors.
The AI chipmaker — whose stock has helped power the market’s feverish rally this year — reported more than $30 billion in sales in its fiscal second quarter, up 122% from the same period a year ago, and ahead of the $28.7 billion Wall Street analysts had expected. Profits from the quarter also more than doubled to $16.6 billion, up from the $15 billion analyst projection.
The company also posted modestly better-than-expected sales guidance for the current quarter, another encouraging sign for investors.
Still, Nvidia shares dipped as much as 5% in after-hours trading following the report.
Nvidia’s peerless AI processors have helped fuel a boom in AI technologies across the tech sector, as well as an AI craze on Wall Street. The company’s shares are up a dizzying 154% this year and more than 3,000% over the past five years, thanks to the AI frenzy. The company’s market value is now over $3 trillion, one of only three US companies ever to achieve that milestone.
But major questions have started to emerge about the sustainability of the AI hype cycle, in large part because of uncertainty about whether — and how soon — the technology will contribute to tech giants’ bottom lines.
What’s more, there’s only so long any company can continue to grow at such a fast clip. While Nvidia beat Wall Street’s expectations for the top and bottom lines, investors appeared disappointed that it didn’t beat by a wider margin. And rumors about potential delays in the company’s latest AI chips, called Blackwell, had contributed to worries leading into the earnings report, although executives said during Wednesday night’s earnings call that Nvidia still expects to begin earning revenue from Blackwell in this fiscal year.
“While the numbers indicate that the AI revolution remains alive and well, the smaller beat compared to the previous quarters adds to the multiple warning signs across the tech space earlier in this earnings season,” Investing.com senior analyst Thomas Monteiro said in an email.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that while demand for Blackwell “far exceeds its supply” in a Bloomberg interview Wednesday, “we’re going to have lots and lots of supply, and we will be able to ramp starting in Q4.”
The trajectory of Nvidia shares has power ripple effects across the broader market, thanks to the company’s outsized, roughly 7% weighting in the S&P 500.
The company’s “earnings report has become the world’s most important financial news event,” Bespoke Investment group wrote in a Wednesday note.
Despite investors’ skittishness, business doesn’t appear to be slowing down for the chipmaker yet.
Nvidia’s data center business continues to be the leading driver of its success, a sign that the demand for AI infrastructure in the tech sector is not slowing down. The company raked in nearly $26.3 billion in data center sales, which comprised 87% of its total revenue.
“The company continues to benefit from a market paradox: Big Tech’s aggressive AI investment strategies drive massive demand for Nvidia’s chips, even as these same companies invest in developing their own silicon,” Emarketer technology analyst Jacob Bourne said in an emailed statement.
Indeed, Silicon Valley heavyweights continue to expand their investments in AI infrastructure, much of which will go to purchasing chips from Nvidia. In their own earnings reports earlier this month, Google, Microsoft and Meta Platforms all signaled that they would be upping their AI spending.
Meta said it expects full-year capital expenditures to be between $37 billion and $40 billion, raising the low end of its guidance from the previous quarter by $2 billion. Microsoft said it expects to spend more in fiscal year 2025 than its $56 billion in capital expenditures from 2024. Google projected capital expenditure spending “at or above” $12 billion for each quarter this year. (Even for extremely rich companies, those are big numbers — for Google, its second quarter capital expenditures amounted to about 17% of its total sales).
Despite concerns about potential Blackwell delays, research firm Third Bridge estimates that 60-70% of AI model training at so-called hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google will take place using the new Nvidia chips by the end of next year, according to analyst Lucas Keh.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang defended the company’s runway during a call with analysts Wednesday following the report, reminding them that the company’s chips don’t just power AI chatbots but also ad targeting systems, search engines, robotics and recommendation algorithms like the ones behind social media feeds.
“People who are investing in Nvidia infrastructure are getting returns on it right away,” Huang said, adding that the company’s more powerful chips process data more efficiently, saving clients money. “In the future, every single data center will have GPUs,” the kind of chip that Nvidia has become known for, Huang said.
Together, those factors should mean that even if the Nvidia stock hype — which has reached such a point that people had organized earnings call listening parties as if it were a championship game — dies down, the company’s fundamentals should remain strong for the foreseeable future.