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Nvidia’s profits and revenues soared in the quarter to the end of January as a rush among technology companies to build artificial intelligence infrastructure continued to fuel booming demand for its advanced chips.
The company said its sales increased 78 per cent year over year to $39.3bn, above estimates in a Bloomberg survey of $38.3bn. The group expects to post revenue of $43bn for the current quarter, plus or minus 2 per cent.
Nvidia had been among the top performing stocks on Wall Street over the past two years, helping to pull the broader market higher, as investors bet it would be one of the main beneficiaries of the rapid growth of AI.
But the shares tumbled this year after Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek claimed it could train models on less advanced chips than rivals such as US-based OpenAI.
Chief executive Jensen Huang in a statement on Wednesday shrugged off those concerns, saying there was “amazing” demand for Nvidia’s latest-generation Blackwell chips. Data centre revenues nearly doubled in the January quarter as Big Tech companies swiftly built out AI offerings. Blackwell delivered $11bn in revenue for the quarter.
Huang specifically addressed DeepSeek during a call with analysts, saying new ‘reasoning’ models such as DeepSeek’s R1 consume much larger amounts of AI chip power than their predecessors, and its sudden arrival on to the scene had “ignited global enthusiasm” for the technology.
“DeepSeek threats or disruptions were not evident in Blackwell’s chip demand or data centre revenues,” said Dec Mullarkey, managing director at SLC Management. “The earnings were not a blowout, but they didn’t show any glaring vulnerabilities either.”
The Blackwell rollout hit some initial snags, with production issues and reports of some iterations of the chip overheating in servers. But Wednesday’s results suggested the transition from the previous chip architecture was proceeding smoothly.
Net income was $22.1bn, up 80 per cent from the same quarter in the year prior even as operating expenses increased almost 50 per cent.
Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress noted profit margins had slipped because of the transition to the “more complex and higher-cost” Blackwell systems.
The company’s shares were little changed in choppy after-hours trading in New York, having risen almost 4 per cent during the regular session.
Analysts had also flagged up ahead of Wednesday’s announcement uncertainties about how potential new US export controls and tariffs could affect Nvidia’s trajectory. It is exposed to geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing as they engage in an arms race over AI technology.
A new ‘AI diffusion’ export control regime was also put forward in the last days of Joe Biden’s administration, aimed at making it harder for China to use other countries to circumvent US export restrictions on AI chips.
Nvidia took the rare step of publicly criticising the rules, saying they would weaken competitiveness and undermine innovation. But Donald Trump’s administration has shown little sign of reversing course on attempts to crack down on China’s access to leading-edge chips. The president has threatened new tariffs on semiconductors from Taiwan.
On tariffs, “at this point it’s a little bit of an unknown . . . until we understand further what the US government’s plan is”, Kress said.
Additional reporting by George Steer
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