Investors losing sleep over Nvidia’s earnings can resume breathing normally. All the news from CEO Jensen Huang was reassuring for stakeholders in the world’s largest publicly traded company.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” Huang said on the company’s investor call.
That “something very different” seems to be tons and tons of money pouring in. The company posted a record $57.01 billion in revenue during its fiscal third quarter. That was well above market expectations of $54.92 billion, as reported by CNBC. Earnings per share also beat expectations at $1.30 versus $1.25.
Nvidia’s bread and butter, the data center business, also brought in record revenue at $51.2 billion, which was up 66% from this time last year.
The tech giant is expecting that record demand to continue, as Huang said in the earnings press release that “Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out.” Revenue expectations for the upcoming quarter were $65 billion, above market expectations of $61.66 billion.
“We currently have visibility to a half a trillion dollars in Blackwell and Rubin [chips] revenue from the start of this year through the end of calendar year 2026,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in the company’s investor call on Wednesday.
The AI industry had been biting its nails in anticipation of this specific report for some time now.
As Nvidia was busy hitting records over the quarter as the first company to ever hit $5 trillion market cap, worries over an AI bubble ballooned steadily. At the heart of every concern was Nvidia, which is considered central to the AI trade as the biggest global supplier of chips.
A growing chorus of experts, from famous investors to economists, central banks and even top tech CEOs themselves, have raised concerns about an overvaluation of AI stocks in recent months.
Then, on top of all that, two major investors, Japan’s SoftBank and Peter Thiel’s hedge fund Thiel Macro, offloaded their entire stake in the company back-to-back over the past two weeks.
Investors were looking to Wednesday’s report to see if Nvidia could back up its meteoric valuations and quell those worries of an impending bubble burst. The shares rose more than 5% in response to the report, so it seems they might be satisfied so far with what they have seen.
Nvidia has had a whirlwind quarter. The tech giant announced a flurry of high profile partnerships, including its first ever with OpenAI competitor Anthropic.
The partnerships added fuel to the AI bubble fire, as experts opined that this infinitely expanding and tangled web of multibillion dollar investments made amongst a handful of giant tech companies with overlapping interests was “circular dealmaking.”
The SEC filing had potentially interesting revelations about one of these partnerships. Though the company characterizes its commitment to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as a clear “agreement,” the tech giant’s whopping $100 billion investment into OpenAI is characterized as “a letter of intent with an opportunity to invest.” The first to point that out was journalist Ed Zitron on X. Nvidia hasn’t yet responded to a Gizmodo request for comment.
Also this past quarter, the company hosted its first GPU Technology Conference in Washington D.C. as CEO Jensen Huang continued cozying up to the Trump administration in hopes of a desirable resolution to the on-again-off-again China chips sales ban saga.
“Sizable purchase orders never materialized” this past quarter due to that political uncertainty, Kress said.
“While we were disappointed in the current state that prevents us from shipping more competitive data center compute products to China, we are committed to continued engagement with the U.S. and China governments,” she added.
But Huang’s efforts may be bearing some fruit. Axios reported earlier on Wednesday that White House officials were asking lawmakers to dump the GAIN AI Act that would heavily restrict Nvidia’s ability to sell chips to China if it passes as part of the upcoming annual defense bill.
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