Nvidia earnings takeaways: Bubble talk, ‘half a trillion’ forecast and China orders

Nvidia on Wednesday reported fiscal third-quarter earnings that beat expectations, and provided a strong forecast for the current quarter.

Wall Street welcomed the report, and Nvidia stock rose after the release and during the conference call. Other stocks in the so-called artificial intelligence trade also saw a boost.

A closer look at Nvidia’s report shows that it continues to dominate the market for AI chips called GPUs, and CEO Jensen Huang sounded confident in the company’s products and bullish on the company’s outlook during a call with analysts.

Nvidia said it expects about $65 billion in sales in the current quarter, which ends in late January. That would be 65% growth on an annual basis.

Here are three key takeaways from Nvidia’s earnings:

On Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Huang began his comments by rejecting the premise of an “AI bubble” held by some investors who are concerned about the billions of dollars being spent on Nvidia chips and potential return on investment.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”

Huang said there were three different kinds of uses for AI that are currently growing, and that all three are contributing to the boom in infrastructure investments.

He said that non-AI software, like for data processing, was increasingly being run on the company’s GPUs, that AI will create new kinds of apps, and that “agentic AI” which doesn’t…