Nvidia surpassed investor expectations for the fourth quarter of 2024 with a 78% jump in revenue year over year.
The company reported $39.3bn in revenue, beating analyst projections of $38.25bn. It also reported $0.89 in earnings a share on Wednesday, beating expectations of $0.84.
Investors will be listening closely to Nvidia’s earnings call, scheduled for 5 pm ET, for any signs of slowing demand for semiconductor chips. The chipmaker’s financials will face scrutiny over possible signals of an end to the AI-fueled market boom that has propelled the company to a stratospheric valuation of $3.1tn.
This earnings call will also be the first look at the company’s financials and demand since China’s DeepSeek AI introduced an AI model that beat many of those made in the US while requiring a fraction of the training and investment. The introduction of DeepSeek initially sent Nvidia’s valuation tumbling by hundreds of billions because the Chinese AI seemed to show that new models did not necessarily need to rely on Nvidia’s most expensive, top-of-the-line graphics processing unit (GPU), as most cutting-edge models out of the US do.
In his initial comments, the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that demand for Blackwell, the company’s top-of-the-line GPU, remained strong.
“Demand for Blackwell is amazing as reasoning AI adds another scaling law – increasing compute for training makes models smarter and increasing compute for long thinking makes the answer smarter,” said Huang. “We’ve successfully ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers, achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter. AI is advancing at light speed as agentic AI and physical AI set the stage for the next wave of AI to revolutionize the largest industries.”
While analysts expected Nvidia to maintain its leadership position as the maker of the AI industry’s favorite chips, recent news has presented new potential challenges to the company’s ownership of the market. Most recently, analysts at TD Cowen published findings earlier in the week that Microsoft, one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, was cancelling leases with private data center operators. Investors expressed concerns about the sustainability of mass investment into AI infrastructure, including Microsoft’s $80bn, which would mean less spending on Nvidia’s wares.
Nevertheless, DeepSeek has not made an immediate impact on the company’s data-center revenue. Nvidia, which controls more than 90% of the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), reported a data-center revenue of $35.6bn for the final quarter of FY 2025. Wall Street had projected $34.09bn. The company also predicted it would bring in $43bn in revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026.
Despite the company’s past stellar performance, analysts expect investors to look for other signs that the company will be capable of meeting the moment as demand for the chips that power AI models remains steady.
“The key question for Nvidia’s Q4 earnings isn’t just about the numbers, but whether the company can maintain its commanding position as AI evolves,” said Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst at eMarketer. “Even if Nvidia posts another quarter of stellar growth, the market reaction will depend on how well it can convince investors that it can tackle these challenges.”
Some analysts predict the ripples from DeepSeek’s launch may not have an immediate impact on Nvidia but could allow competitors like AMD and Intel to “gain a foothold on the lower end of the AI infrastructure market”, said Alvin Nguyen, a senior analyst at Forrester.
“DeepSeek has established a new and lower base of performance for generative AI (specifically for chain-of-thought/reasoning models), allowing for more organisations to experiment with AI,” Nguyen added.
