Nvidia reported another quarter of strong growth on Wednesday, with results topping analyst expectations and reinforcing its role as a leading provider of chips for the artificial intelligence boom. For the November-January period, the Santa Clara, California, company said fiscal fourth-quarter revenue jumped 73% from the prior year to $68.1 billion, while profit nearly doubled to about $43 billion, or $1.76 per share.
Jake Behan, head of capital markets for Direxion, said Nvidia’s report arrived at a moment when investors were looking for positive momentum tied to the “AI trade.” Nvidia’s earnings, he said, “brought plenty of it,” and the quarterly results showed another instance of the company clearing the bar set by analysts as its high-end chips have become a central building block for AI computing over the past three years.
In addition to the results, Nvidia provided a forecast for the February-April period that the company said exceeded analyst projections. Huang used a conference call with analysts to reinforce that the demand for Nvidia’s chips remains strong, framing the AI boom as still in the early stages of a larger buildout. “No quarter has had more riding on it than this one,” Behan said in the AP report, underscoring the attention investors have placed on Nvidia’s next steps.
During the call, Huang said the company’s chip demand is still “skyrocketing.” He added, “AI is here, AI is not going to go back,” and said, “AI is only going to only get better from here,” as he argued the technology’s expansion is continuing rather than flattening after earlier surges in spending.
Still, the reaction to the quarter reflected lingering uncertainty among some investors. The AP report said that after Nvidia’s stock rose about 4% in extended trading when the results came out, the shares backtracked and were slightly down after Huang’s upbeat remarks. The report also noted that even with Nvidia repeatedly beating analyst forecasts, investors have sometimes reacted negatively, including after a prior earnings report that drove the stock down the following day.
The company’s quarter arrives amid heightened investor focus on the scale and pace of AI-related spending by large cloud and technology firms. The AP report said Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta Platforms collectively made commitments to spend about $650 billion this year to ramp up AI computing power, with much of the money expected to flow into more Nvidia chips to power what the report described as AI “factories.”
Nvidia’s growth story has paralleled those spending plans. The AP report said the company’s annual revenue rose from $27 billion to $216 billion, and it cited analyst expectations that Nvidia’s revenue could surpass $330 billion during its next fiscal year, which would be an increase of more than 50% from the prior year.
As the latest quarter landed, the AP report highlighted an additional source of investor anxiety: whether the rapid AI-driven run that has boosted Nvidia’s valuation from about $400 billion at the end of 2022 to nearly $4.8 trillion now risks a later “comedown.” The concern comes as investors try to interpret whether the latest AI-market rally is supported by sustainable earnings growth or has outpaced what the real economy can ultimately bear.