Nvidia has once again sailed past Wall Street’s expectations, reporting quarterly results that underline how heavily the technology industry is still spending on artificial intelligence. For the May to July period, the chipmaker posted net income of 59.69 billion dollars, or 2.46 dollars per share, more than double the 26.42 billion dollars it earned in the same quarter a year earlier.
Revenue told a similar story. It came in at 96.22 billion dollars, again more than double the figure from a year ago and comfortably ahead of the roughly 92 billion analysts had forecast. Stripped of certain items, earnings reached 2.22 dollars per share, above the 2.09 that Wall Street had penciled in. “AI has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work,” chief executive Jensen Huang said, adding that compute had become revenue.
The Santa Clara, California company has beaten analyst forecasts repeatedly over the past three years, ever since its high-end processors became the preferred building blocks for AI systems. Growth is not expected to slow. Nvidia guided to revenue of about 108 billion dollars for the current quarter and said it expects to expand revenue by around 70 percent in the fiscal year ending in January 2028.
Demand, in fact, is outstripping what the company can supply. Huang told analysts the entire supply chain was under strain and that Nvidia currently had supply for only about 70 percent of what customers want. Most of the money is flowing through its data center business, which generated 89 billion dollars as cloud operators such as Amazon, Meta and Google keep building. Capital spending by the five largest of those operators is expected to approach 800 billion dollars this year.
Not everyone is convinced the boom can last. Nvidia’s market value has climbed from about 400 billion dollars at the end of 2022 to roughly 5.2 trillion, and some investors worry about a sharp comedown if the returns on all this spending disappoint. There is also growing public pushback, from objections to sprawling new data centers to fears that rapid AI adoption could cost jobs. For now, though, the numbers point in one direction, and the company’s own outlook suggests its extraordinary run is still gathering pace.
