Nvidia delivers big once again, and investors brush aside the bigger picture about AI spending
Nvidia once again delivered a blockbuster earnings report , and once again, it mostly told investors what they already knew. The appetite for AI compute remains insatiable. But the real debate — whether all this capacity being built today will be profitable tomorrow — remains unresolved. Investors aren’t pressing that issue just yet, choosing instead to focus on another quarter of stunning growth and sending the stock and other related names higher. Nvidia shares jumped more than 5% in after hours trading, while other stocks heavily tied to the AI demand climbed in sympathy. Advanced Micro Devices jumped more than 4%, Broadcom rose nearly 3%, Taiwan Semiconductor climbed 3%, and Super Micro Computer added 5%. Cloud computing giant Oracle shares gained more than 3%. “Tonight the markets and tech stocks got a pop the champagne moment with Nvidia’s robust earnings and guidance,” Dan Ives of Wedbush said in a note to clients. Nvidia’s most important business data center recorded $51.2 billion in sales, easily surpassing analyst expectations for $49.09 billion and marking a 66% rise on a year-over-year basis. “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 shares had fallen about 8% this month as fears about an AI bubble deepened. Some investors said the strong earnings report should offer an opportunity to buy the dip. “If you don’t own enough of it, you got to add more here,” James Demmert of Main Street Research said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.” Still, as Nvidia continues to print astonishing revenue and guidance, most companies investing billions into GPUs are still trying to figure out how they will monetize AI. “The real issue … is whether this capacity is economically viable – and that is going to be a constant overhang for a long time to come (if H20 sales fell to essentially zero, doesn’t that support those who feel there should be an accelerated depreciation schedule for these GPUs given the rapid upgrade cycle?),” Adam Crisafulli, founder of Vital Knowledge, said in a note. Michael Burry, the investor made famous by “The Big Short,” recently alleged that hyperscalers — the major cloud and AI infrastructure providers — are understating depreciation expenses by estimating that chips will have a longer life cycle than is realistic. Burry doubled down on his theory Wednesday evening after Nvidia’s earnings report. “The idea of a useful life for depreciation being longer because chips from more than 3-4 years ago are fully booked confuses physical utilization with value creation,” he said in an X post . “Just because something is used does not mean it is profitable. GAAP refers to economic benefits.” Then there’s competition. AMD and custom AI accelerators from major tech companies could be starting to claw at Nvidia’s dominant market share. “These numbers are very strong, but as expected,” said David Russell, global head of market strategy at TradeStation. “They come on a day that Alphabet hit a new high thanks to an AI model that doesn’t use Blackwell, so investors might be asking if it’s time to move on to other names. … There are inevitably questions whether Huang’s company has already reached its high-water mark in terms of growth and market share.”
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