Nvidia’s Profit Jumps 80 Percent as Company Rides Tech’s AI Boom – The New York Times

Artificial Intelligence
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The Silicon Valley company, which dominates the market for chips needed to build A.I. systems, said revenue was up 78 percent from a year earlier.
By Tripp Mickle
Tripp Mickle reports on Nvidia from San Francisco.
When Nvidia lost $600 billion in market value in a single day last month, it was because some investors feared for the future of the artificial intelligence chipmaker. DeepSeek, a Chinese start-up, said it had made its A.I. systems with a small fraction of the A.I. chips used by other companies, and at a small fraction of the cost.
On Wednesday, Nvidia showed those fears were overblown, even as the breakneck pace of its growth slows. The company, a bellwether for A.I., said purchases of its A.I. chips lifted its total revenue by 78 percent from a year earlier to $39.33 billion during the three months that ended in January. Profit rose 80 percent to $22.09 billion.
In previous quarters, Nvidia reported that sales and profits had more than doubled. But continuing to deliver those kinds of gains has become more difficult as its sales and profits rise. (For a business like Nvidia, it is common for the growth rate to slow after a period of phenomenal increases, a phenomenon known as the law of large numbers.)
Nvidia’s quarterly results exceeded Wall Street analysts’ expectations for $38.32 billion in sales and $21.08 billion in profit. The company projected that revenue in the current quarter would rise 65 percent from a year ago to $43 billion, a slowdown from the previous quarter but about $1 billion more than Wall Street had predicted.
Shares in Nvidia were almost flat in after-hours trading, after a 3.7 percent gain on Wednesday. It remains the world’s second-most-valuable publicly traded company, behind Apple.
Nvidia’s business has been buoyed by the biggest tech companies’ nonstop spending on A.I. data centers. After pouring tens of billions of dollars into new infrastructure last year, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have said they will each spend $65 billion to $100 billion or more this year.
Much of that money will flow straight to Nvidia. The company, by some estimates, controls 90 percent of the market for the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that power A.I. systems. It is rolling out a new, more powerful series of A.I. chips known as Blackwell and charges $60,000 to $70,000 for a signature chip. Blackwell contributed $11 billion in sales during the quarter.
How long the build-out of data centers will last has been a question since the start of the A.I. boom. DeepSeek challenged a tech industry consensus that to build bigger and better A.I. systems, companies would have to build bigger and more powerful data centers. It set off fears that companies might pull back on their spending with Nvidia.
Since then, a new consensus has emerged that Nvidia will continue to benefit because it will become affordable for more companies to develop A.I. systems. An expanded field of A.I. businesses would create more customers for Nvidia’s expensive chips, not fewer, as initially feared.
Nvidia said data center revenue, which includes the sale of chips, cables and high-performance computing, rose 93 percent to $35.58 billion in the quarter from a year earlier.
“Nobody is backing off their commitment to build A.I. data centers and the power to generate more electricity for those data centers,” said Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management, a financial firm that tracks Nvidia. “Everyone is still competing.”
Though Nvidia has rebounded since late January, concerns about data center spending continue to whiplash the stock. Shares fell nearly 6 percent early this week after Wall Street analysts reported that Microsoft had canceled some data center contracts. Microsoft didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in a call with analysts on Wednesday that the company would benefit as businesses changed the way they developed A.I. because its Blackwell chips were more powerful and versatile than their predecessor. It also has visibility into the amount of money being spent on data centers, which he said would increase as companies introduced new tools such as A.I. agents that can autonomously perform tasks like online shopping.
“The next wave is coming,” Mr. Huang said. He added, “We’re in the center of this development, and we can see great activity happening.”
“We’ve successfully ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell A.I. supercomputers, achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter. A.I. is advancing at light speed.”
Nvidia continues to face geopolitical challenges, as well. The Biden administration curbed the sale of its chips to China and introduced a rule to cap the sales of its A.I. chips to more than 100 countries. Howard Lutnick, the Trump administration’s commerce secretary, told Congress during his confirmation hearing that tech companies, including Nvidia, “need to stop helping” China.
Since the U.S. government began restricting chip exports, Nvidia’s sales in China have been cut in half to about 15 percent of total revenue. The company said it didn’t expect sales in China to rebound.
Late last month, Mr. Huang visited the White House to discuss A.I. and semiconductors with President Trump. Mr. Trump told reporters afterward that he couldn’t say whether he would ban more of Nvidia’s chip sales to China. He also has threatened tariffs on semiconductors, including Nvidia’s chips made in Taiwan.
Colette Kress, Nvidia’s finance chief, said the company was monitoring tariffs. “It’s an unknown until we understand further what the U.S. government’s plan is, both its timing, its where and how much,” she said. “We are awaiting.”
Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis. More about Tripp Mickle
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