Nvidia stock soars after results, forecasts top estimates with sales for AI chips 'off the charts'
Nvidia (NVDA) reported its third quarter earnings on Wednesday, beating analysts' estimates on the top and bottom lines and offering a better-than-anticipated outlook. For the fourth quarter, Nvidia projects revenue of $65 billion plus or minus 2%. Wall Street was expecting revenue of $62 billion. “Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out,” CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “We’ve entered the virtuous cycle of AI. The AI ecosystem is scaling fast — with more new foundation model makers, more AI startups, across more industries, and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once," he added. Nvidia stock rose more than 4% on the news. The chipmaker's report buoyed other AI companies, with AMD's stock rising nearly 4% and Micron climbing more than 3% in after-hours action. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft stock also rose slightly. For Q3, Nvidia saw earnings per share (EPS) of $1.30 on revenue of $57.01 billion. Analysts were anticipating EPS of $1.26 on revenue of $55.2 billion, according to Bloomberg consensus data. The company saw EPS and revenue of $0.81 and $35.1 billion, respectively, in the same period last year. The AI giant's data center business brought in $51.2 billion versus estimates of $49.3 billion. Nvidia's gaming revenue was $4.3 billion, just short of the $4.4 billion estimate. "Blackwell Ultra is now our leading architecture across all customer categories while our prior Blackwell architecture saw continued strong demand," CFO Colette Kress said in a statement. Revenue from its China-specific H20 chip was "insignificant," she added. Nvidia's report comes after the company's market capitalization briefly eclipsed $5 trillion last month. Ahead of the earnings announcement, Peter Thiel's hedge fund sold off its entire roughly $100 million stake in Nvidia. SoftBank Group (SFTBY) also unloaded all of its Nvidia stock, valued at $5.8 billion, as the company seeks to fund its own enormous AI bets. It also follows remarks from rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su during the company's Financial Analyst Day, during which she said that she believes the data center market will be worth as much as $1 trillion by 2030. Read more: Live coverage of corporate earnings Nvidia stock is up more than 37% year to date and 25% over the last 12 months. Shares of AMD are up 82% year-to-date and 58% over the last 12 months. Despite those gains, the AI trade gained a major detractor last week in investor Michael Burry, who famously shorted the housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. In a post on X, Burry claimed that companies, including Meta (META) and Oracle (ORCL), are artificially boosting their earnings results by understating the depreciation of data center equipment.
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