Nvidia Beats Estimates, Stock Rises

Nvidia reported fiscal third-quarter earnings and revenue that topped Wall Street expectations on Wednesday and provided stronger-than-expected sales guidance for the fourth quarter.

Shares of the AI chipmaker rose more than 4% in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:

• Earnings per share: $1.30 adjusted vs. $1.25 estimated
• Revenue: $57.01 billion vs. $54.92 billion estimated

Nvidia said it expects about $65 billion in sales in the current quarter, versus $61.66 billion expected by analysts.

The company said net income in the quarter rose 65% to $31.91 billion, or $1.30 per share, from $19.31 billion, or 78 cents per share, in the year-ago period.

Nvidia has become the most valuable publicly traded company, mostly on insatiable demand for its AI chips, called GPUs. Nvidia counts Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Meta as customers. Its chips are used by all the leading tech companies to develop new artificial intelligence models.

Nvidia’s sales and outlook are closely watched by the technology industry as a sign for the health of the AI boom.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on an earnings call. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”

Nvidia’s most important business is data center sales. Nvidia said it had $51.2 billion in data center sales, easily surpassing analyst expectations for $49.09 billion in sales during the quarter, a 66% rise on a year-over-year basis.

Of that, $43 billion in revenue was for “compute,” or the company’s GPUs. The company said that much of the growth was driven by initial sales of the company’s GB300 chips. Networking, or parts that allow scores of GPUs to work as one computer, accounted for $8.2 billion in data center sales.

Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress said in a statement that the company’s best-selling chip family is now Blackwell Ultra, the second-generation version of the company’s Blackwell chips.

Nvidia’s report comes a few weeks after the company’s megacap peers, and leading customers, issued their quarterly results. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.

Huang said in a statement that “cloud GPUs are sold out,” addressing investor concerns over the company’s rapidly growing sales going to a handful of cloud providers called hyperscalers which need to find end-users for the chips.

Huang in October said that the company has $500 billion in orders, for 2025 and 2026 combined, for its AI chips.

“The number will grow,” Kress said on an earnings call with analysts.

Before the AI boom, Nvidia was best-known for making chips for playing 3D video games. Nvidia said it had $4.3 billion in gaming revenue, up 30% from the year-ago period.

Another legacy line item for Nvidia is its professional visualization business, which reported $760 million in sales during the quarter, up 56% on a year-over-year basis. That included sales from a product called DGX Spark, which is Nvidia’s AI desktop computer that was announced earlier this year.

The company has also highlighted robotics as one of its most important growth areas. Third-quarter automotive and robotics sales totaled $592 million, up 32% on an annual basis.

Nvidia said that it was “disappointed” that it cannot ship current-generation Blackwell chips to China. Although the company got export licenses for the H20 chip, Kress said that it only had $50 million of sales during the quarter.

“Sizable purchase orders never materialized in the quarter due to geopolitical issues and the increasingly competitive market in China,” Kress said.

Nvidia said it made $12.5 billion of share repurchases and paid $243 million in dividends during the quarter.