Nvidia revenues totaled $39.33 billion, higher than the market estimate of $38.05 billion. Earnings per share clocked in at $0.89, topping analysts’ forecasts of $0.84.
Net income climbed to $22.09 billion, up from $12.29 billion a year ago.
The numbers suggest that Nvidia continued to ride the artificial intelligence (AI) wave to close out 2024.
Looking ahead, first-quarter revenues are projected to be about $43 billion, coming in above the consensus forecast of $41.78 billion.
For shareholders, a great deal of focus is on the speed of shipments of Nvidia’s next-generation AI processors, also known as Blackwell. Despite hiccups in recent months, Nvidia posted $11 billion in revenues from Blackwell sales, fueled by large cloud service providers that represented about 50 percent of the company’s data center revenue.
“We’ve successfully ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers, achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “AI is advancing at light speed as agentic AI and physical AI set the stage for the next wave of AI to revolutionize the largest industries.”
Tech leviathans, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, are spending billions constructing their AI data centers. A large share of these investments are going straight to Nvidia.
Gaming revenues declined 11 percent year-over-year in the last quarter amid supply constraints.
After the closing bell, shares jumped as much as 3 percent to above $134.
“The combination of results and guidance was in line slightly ahead of what investors wanted to see,” John Belton, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, in a note to The Epoch Times.
“It should be a positive read for AI demand and investment cycle. Supply does not seem to be an issue.”
Nvidia Not Worried About DeepSeek
Nvidia has been at the top of the tech mountain since the AI waves hit the shores of Wall Street three years ago.Despite holding the heavyweight crown of AI chipmaking, the tech titan could be grappling with a plethora of near-term challenges.
“DeepSeek has taken the market by storm by doing more with less,” Giuseppe Sette, the president of AI market research company Reflexivity, told The Epoch Times at the time. “In layman’s terms, they activate only the most relevant portions of their model for each query, and that saves money and computation power. This shows that with AI, the surprises will keep on coming in the next few years.”
Investors have been concerned that more efficient and cost-effective AI models could cause customers to purchase less expensive chips in the long run.
He stated that the Chinese company’s chatbot would encourage businesses to spend more money on high-powered processes.
“I think the market responded to R1 as an ‘Oh my gosh, AI is finished,’“ Huang stated. ”From an investor perspective, there was a mental model that the world was pretraining and then inference. I don’t know whose fault it is, but obviously, that paradigm is wrong.”
So far, other tech behemoths have not revealed plans to curtail their AI investments.
Microsoft, meanwhile, plans to integrate DeepSeek’s AI model into its Azure cloud-computing ecosystem. Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO and chair, espoused the Chinese firm’s “real innovations” that will be “commoditized” and “get broadly used.”
Navigating Tariff Turbulence
The next potential hurdle for Nvidia to overcome is tariffs.President Donald Trump told reporters last week that he plans to implement tariffs “in the neighborhood of 25 percent” on semiconductor, automobile, and pharmaceutical imports.
“They left us, and they went to Taiwan and we don’t want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program that [former President Joe] Biden has,” Trump said.
According to Trump, foreign chipmakers did not need the money but rather an incentive. “The incentive is going to be, they’re not going to want to pay a 25, 50, or even 100 percent tax,” he said.
“We need to have, for national security, and for our business, we need to have that production,” Lutnick said.
In the November third-quarter earnings call, Huang pledged to comply with the new administration’s trade policy.
“Whatever the new administration decides, we'll, of course, support the administration. And that’s the highest mandate,” Huang told shareholders and analysts.
Quantum Computing
In January, Huang hurled cold water on quantum computing, calling the technology decades away from offering the public any practical use.“If you kind of said 15 years, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it’s probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it,” he said at the Consumer Electronics Show.
These comments sank quantum computing stocks as the sector had been planning to invest millions of dollars in the technology.
Market analysts were surprised when Microsoft unveiled the Majorana 1 quantum chip this month. The chip was manufactured to support large-scale and practical quantum applications.
“This is an interesting rebuttal essentially against Jensen Huang’s, CEO of Nvidia, comment earlier in the year that quantum computing is possibly multiple decades away,” said Ken Mahoney, the CEO of Mahoney Asset Management, in a note emailed to The Epoch Times.
“They [Microsoft] are aiming to build a quantum computer that can actually be used and implemented by the end of this decade, so we are looking at something that is five years away, not something like 30 as Huang had said.”
Quantum computing relies on the principles of quantum mechanics, with experts prognosticating that it could revolutionize various industries, from drug manufacturing to weather forecasting.
