Nvidia earnings: Wall Street sighs with relief after AI wave doesn’t crash
Markets expectations around Wednesday’s quarterly earnings report by the most valuable publicly traded company in the world had risen to a fever pitch.Anxiety over billions in investment in artificial intelligence pervaded, in part because the US has been starved of reliable economic data by the recent government shutdown.Investors hoped that both questions would be in part answered by Nvidia’s earnings and by a jobs report due on Thursday morning.“This is a ‘So goes Nvidia, so goes the market’ kind of report,” Scott Martin, chief investment officer at Kingsview Wealth Management, told Bloomberg in a concise summary of market sentiment.The prospect of a market mood swing had built in advance of the earnings call, with options markets anticipating Nvidia’s shares could move 6%, or $280bn in value, up or down.
Julian Emanuel, Evercore ISI’s chief equities strategist, told the Financial Times that “angst around ‘peak AI’ has been palpable”.The anxiety has only been heightened by signs that some AI players, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel, Japanese investor Masayoshi Son of SoftBank have recently sold off multi-billion positions in Nvidia if only (in the case of SoftBank) to place those funds in OpenAI.Michael Burry, who became a legend on Wall Street for taking a short position ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, announced that he was shorting Nvidia and Palantir stock – and warned of an AI bubble – before abruptly winding down his investment company, Scion Asset Management.Analysts had expected the chip behemoth to show more than 50% growth in both net income and revenue in its fiscal third quarter as the tech giants – Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta – that represent more than 40% of Nvidia’s sales continue to pour billions into the chipmaker.The company reported growth beyond even those lofty expectations.
Nvidia reported $57.01bn in total revenues, beating investor expectations of $54.9bn in revenue.Sales increased 62% year-over-year, and profit rose 65% year-on-year to $31.9bn.
On the key metric of datacenter sales, the company reported $51.2bn in revenue, beating expectations of $49bn.Nvidia’s future looks bright, too.The company is projecting fourth-quarter revenue of about $65bn; analysts had predicted the company would issue a guidance of $61bn.CEO Jensen Huang addressed the elephant in the room on Wednesday’s earnings call after Nvidia’s stellar numbers were released.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” he said.“From our vantage point, we see something very different.As a reminder, Nvidia is unlike any other accelerator.We excel at every phase of AI from pre-training to post-training to inference.”Sign up to TechScapeA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesafter newsletter promotionMarket analysts had been on the lookout for signs that the big AI spenders could be forced to pull back their spending on Nvidia’s wares or show any lack of absolute dedication to the AI investment behemoth that in one form or another represents with some estimates attributing as much as 75% of the S&P 500’s gains in 2025.
Investors have grown wary of the AI boom, with shares in Nvidia and Palantir, a major AI player, falling more than 10% since peaking last month,The Nasdaq stock exchange has seen a broad, panicked selloff over the past few days in response to these fears,Still, Nvidia shares are up about 37% for the year to date, and they rose in after-hours trading on Wednesday,The Nvidia earnings report, and investor reaction over the coming hours or days, will be read into for broader economic signals because AI is now intimately tied, correctly or falsely, to broader economic confidence, with Nvidia as the foundation for the entire artificial intelligence buildout,“Market psychology has been negative this month as investors worried that the artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout was a bubble and in a few years we may look back at this time and point to signs that it was,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Northlight Asset Management after the earnings report was released.
For bullish analysts, fears that the AI revolution would soon follow the path of internet stocks in 1999 have been entirely overblown, and the AI party is only just getting started.“The largest technology companies in the world are extremely profitable and they are reinvesting billions of dollars into datacenters, servers and chips, and the spending is real,” Zaccarelli added.
Boris Becker: ‘Whoever says a prison life is easy is lying – it’s a real punishment’
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Former Rhondda roofer Harri Deaves to make Wales debut against the All Blacks
Harri Deaves began his working life as a roofer but on Saturday the Ospreys flanker will run out in the scarlet shirt of Wales against the All Blacks to complete “an amazing story” from club rugby player to international.The 24-year-old will win his first cap in a Wales side showing five changes from the one that edged out Japan 24-23 with a last-gasp penalty.Deaves’s ascent is one of the game’s more uncommon career paths in the era of professional rugby. He joined the Ospreys Academy from his local club, Pontyclun, in the Rhondda after a brief civil engineering course at Bridgend College.His early days at Ospreys, alongside British & Irish Test Lions Alex Cuthbert, Justin Tipuric and Rhys Webb, saw him turn up for morning training sessions in his van ahead of afternoon work as a roofer
Revealed: sports agent Jonathan Barnett’s three-year legal battle with John Regis and Jennifer Stoute
Special report: A leading agent and two Olympians fell out when their talent agency was sold, leading to ‘three years of torture’ which came to a sudden end after the emergence of text messages sent to a phone registered to BarnettA high-court claim that had pitted the leading sports agent Jonathan Barnett against his former business partners, the Olympic medallists John Regis and Jennifer Stoute, was withdrawn after an extraordinary three-year legal battle.A partnership of which Barnett was a member, the sports agency Stellar Athletics LLP, pursued a claim against Regis and Stoute for £1.2m after they left in 2021. It was settled by the parent company, CAA Stellar, in April 2024, shortly after Barnett himself resigned from the company.Speaking about the matter for the first time, Stoute described the case as “three years of torture”
Welcome to the Ashes, the classic cricket rivalry that never really starts or stops
Some say the Border-Gavaskar Trophy is now pre-eminent, but there is nothing more intense than Australia v EnglandIf it feels like the buildup to this Ashes series has lasted 842 days that is because it pretty much has. Test cricket’s oldest rivalry resumes on Friday inside Perth’s 60,000-seat thunderdome and with it, mercifully, comes fresh fuel for the ever-raging fire.Because on one level the Ashes never really starts or stops. Since Stuart Broad nicked off Alex Carey at the Oval on 31 July 2023 – the final act of a dramatic 2-2 draw – the sides have been tracking each other, all while their supporters chip away from afar.To the rest of the world this obsession must get a bit tiresome
Lewis Hamilton defends work ethic after Ferrari chief’s ‘talk less’ rebuke
Lewis Hamilton has insisted he does not believe he can work any harder to help improve Ferrari’s performance.The 40-year-old driver was reacting to a rebuke from the Ferrari president John Elkann, who had stated he should: “Focus on driving and talk less.” Hamilton however maintained pointedly that the issues at Ferrari would not be fixed with “the click of a finger”.Hamilton, who has yet to claim a podium for Ferrari in what has been an immensely trying first season with the team, was outspoken after another disappointing race at the last round in Brazil, after which he described his debut year with a Ferrari as “a nightmare”. Elkann responded equally bluntly with his riposte
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