Nvidia on Wednesday posted $68 billion in sales in its fiscal fourth quarter, a 20% jump that beat analyst expectations and helped quiet the drumbeat about a looming artificial-intelligence bubble.
“Computing demand is growing exponentially,” CEO Jensen Huang said on an earnings call, adding that “the agentic AI inflection point has arrived.”
He added that partnerships with tech leaders including Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI have been tailwinds for his company, which he co-founded in 1993 and has seen a meteoric rise in the AI era.
Nvidia raked in $43 billion in net income — up 35% from a year ago — in its latest quarter.
Wall Street had predicted $37.5 billion in profit and $66.1 billion in revenue, according to estimates compiled by FactSet.
The company’s data center business — the chips and networking gear powering AI and cloud heavyweights — led the way, accounting for 91.4% of total sales, or $62.3 billion.
Nvidia’s results appeared to mark the latest signal that there’s plenty of life left in the AI frenzy.
At nearly $5 trillion in market value, Nvidia is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company and has become the bellwether for tracking the red-hot AI sector.
Nvidia’s research and development budget of $20 billion has helped it churn out revenue growth, said the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer Colette Kress
Nvidia’s stock has been on a roller coaster as AI fever has seesawed while investors grow anxious that firms have overinvested in the technology. Shares sank to $170.94 in mid-December amid bubble fears, but have since risen above $190.
The stock closed at $195.56 at end of trading on Wednesday, before the earnings came out.
Nvidias’ record sales could slow down if big customers like OpenAI can’t continue to get financing, Brian Mulberry of Zacks Investment Management told the Wall Street Journal.
Still, Nvidia’s chips — considered the best of their kind — position the company to whether any storm in at least the short term, Mulberry added.
“At the end of the day, they’re still the most in-demand piece of hardware in the AI market, regardless of what side of it you’re on,” he was quoted as saying.
