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Nvidia’s revenues soared in the quarter to the end of January as demand for its artificial intelligence-focused chips boomed.
The company said its sales increased 78 per cent year over year to $39.3bn, above estimates in a Bloomberg survey of $38.3bn. The group expects to post revenue of $43bn for the current quarter, plus or minus 2 per cent, roughly in line with Wall Street expectations.
Nvidia had been among the top performing stocks on Wall Street over the past two years, helping to pull the entire market higher, as investors bet it would be one of the beneficiaries of the rapid growth of AI.
But the shares tumbled this year after Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek claimed it made several breakthroughs in performing complex tasks using less advanced chips than rivals such as US-based OpenAI.
Chief executive Jensen Huang on Wednesday shrugged off those concerns, saying in a statement that there was “amazing” demand for Nvidia’s latest-generation Blackwell chips. Data centre revenues nearly doubled in the January quarter as Big Tech companies rapidly built out AI offerings. Blackwell delivered $11bn in revenue for the quarter.
“DeepSeek threats or disruptions were not evident in Blackwell’s chip demand or data centre revenues,” said Dec Mullarkey, managing director at SLC Management. “The earnings were not a blowout, but they didn’t show any glaring vulnerabilities either.”
The Blackwell rollout hit some initial snags, with production issues and reports of some iterations of the chip overheating in servers.
Analysts on Wednesday were looking for reassurance that the transition from the previous chip architecture was proceeding smoothly, and that demand for Blackwell would continue to outstrip supply this year.
Net income was $22.1bn, up 80 per cent from the same quarter in the year prior even as operating expenses increased almost 50 per cent.
Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress noted that profit margins had slipped due to the transition to the “more complex and higher-cost” Blackwell systems.
Nvidia shares rose around 1 per cent in choppy after-hours trading in New York, having risen almost 4 per cent during the regular session.
Additional reporting by George Steer
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