By Anders Bylund
Publication Date: 2026-10-14 19:19:00
On Nov. 16, 2022, Nvidia (NVDA -3.26%) reported results for the third quarter of fiscal 2023. It wasn’t a great report. The chip designer missed Wall Street’s average bottom-line target, even.
Revenue fell 17% year over year, and gaming sales were cut in half. New U.S. export rules blocked its top data center chips from China. Management took a $702 million inventory charge for products it no longer expected to sell in the Chinese market. If you skimmed the headlines that evening and went back to your couch, nobody could blame you.
Two weeks later, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and the tech world went bananas. Nvidia was already shipping chips to support the generative AI wonder. The stock was worth roughly $390 billion back then, and $5.5 trillion in October 2026. Things have changed, and November 2022 was a turning point.
So I went back and checked out that ho-hum earnings call. Hindsight is cheating, I know. It’s also a pretty good way to learn what an early signal might look like before it becomes obvious.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Image source: Nvidia.
The ghost in the gaming numbers
Nvidia still had a gamer’s reputation. The pandemic graphics card frenzy, further juiced by crypto miners, had ended with a whimper. Its ghost was haunting the sales channel in the form of unsold inventory and secondhand cards on eBay. When an analyst asked about leftover mining hardware, CEO Jensen Huang said he didn’t expect blockchain to be an important part of the business anymore.
In…