Nvidia shares soar after beating earnings forecast

Chip giant Nvidia beat Wall Street’s expectations for revenue and upcoming sales, easing investor concerns about heavy artificial intelligence (AI) spending that have unsettled markets.

In its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, the firm said revenue for the three months to October jumped 62% to $57bn, driven by demand for its chips used in AI data centres. Sales from that division rose 66% to more than $51bn.

Fourth-quarter sales forecasts in the range of $65bn also topped estimates, sending shares in Nvidia more than 3% higher in after-hours trading.

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is seen as a bellwether for the AI boom. The chip-maker’s results could inform market sentiment.

Chief executive Jensen Huang said in a statement that sales of its AI Blackwell systems were “off the charts” and that “cloud GPUs [graphics processing units] are sold out”.

The chip-maker’s quarterly report garnered even more attention than usual on Wall Street amid mounting concern that AI stocks are overvalued.

Those fears had fueled four consecutive daily drops in the S&P 500 index leading up to Wednesday, as questions swirl about returns on AI investments.

The bar was high heading into Nvidia’s results.

Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial, said the question was not whether the company would beat expectations, “but by how much”.

Mr Huang had previously said he expected $500bn in AI chip orders through next year.

Investors were looking for details about when the company expects those revenues will come to fruition, and how it plans to fulfill the orders, analysts said.

The titans of the technology sector are ramping up their spending on AI, as they rush to reap the benefits of a boom that has pushed stocks to record highs.

Earnings reports from Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft last month reaffirmed the colossal amounts of money these firms are shelling out for everything from data centres to chips.

Sundar Pichai, the head of Google’s parent firm Alphabet, told the BBC that while the growth of AI investment had been an “extraordinary moment”, there was some “irrationality” in the current AI boom. His comments came amid other warnings from industry leaders.