We're now two years removed from OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT, and there's no doubt which company has been the biggest winner of the generative AI revolution so far.
Nvidia (NVDA -2.09%), now best known for making cutting-edge chips capable of powering AI applications like ChatGPT, has seen its stock jump by 10 times since the beginning of 2023, making plenty of investors significantly richer. This month, it again became the world's most valuable company, with a market cap of more than $3.5 trillion.
Despite concerns that competition would bring it to heel or that the AI megatrend was inflating a bubble that would eventually burst, Nvidia has continued to deliver blowout results, and that pattern was on display once again in the fiscal 2025 third-quarter earnings report it delivered Wednesday.
Total revenue in the quarter jumped 94% year over year to $35.1 billion, topping the consensus estimate of $33.1 billion. The data center segment, where revenue jumped 112% to $30.8 billion, drove that growth, as demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) continues to outstrip supply.
Profits also surged as the company continued to gain leverage on its operating expenses. On a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis, operating income jumped by 110% to $21.9 billion, and adjusted earnings per share surged from $0.40 to $0.81, ahead of the consensus estimate of $0.75.
Image source: Nvidia.
Nvidia is everywhere all at once
Never before in history has a company as big as Nvidia grown so fast. Remarkably, its 94% revenue growth was its slowest pace on a percentage basis in six quarters, but it's sustaining blistering growth rates for much longer than analysts had expected. The amount of revenue in dollar terms that it's adding each quarter is also increasing sequentially, so the real growth of the business is accelerating even as its percentage growth moderates.
Earlier this year, some analysts were questioning whether the level of dominance Nvidia has established in the AI chip sector was sustainable. Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have launched their own competing AI accelerators. However, they have struggled to make a dent in Nvidia's dominant market share. AMD disappointed the market with its latest earnings report and announced layoffs earlier this month, while Intel began a massive restructuring after its stock hit a 20-year low.
At this point, the key constraint on Nvidia's growth is on the supply side, as CEO Jensen Huang recently said demand for its latest GPUs, built using its new Blackwell architecture, is "insane."
Describing demand for the Blackwell chips on the earnings call, CFO Colette Kress said, "Every customer is racing to be the first to market."
Management stressed how broad Blackwell's reach is in terms of applications and customer base, and how vast its partner ecosystem is. "[A]lmost every company in the world seems to be involved in our supply chain," Huang said.
Beyond the concerns that rivals could make headway against it, the other bearish case about Nvidia revolves around the idea of an "AI bubble." Some onlookers think that market demand for AI applications won't justify the massive capital expenditures on AI infrastructure that are fueling Nvidia's growth.
However, when asked about it on the earnings call, Huang pushed back on the idea that AI is reaching scaling limitations, saying, "Our foundation model pre-training scaling is intact, and it's continuing." He also said that it was key for post-training and inference to scale in order for large language models and other AI models to become more capable.
Is Nvidia a buy?
After having successfully withstood competition from AMD and Intel, and delivering another blowout quarter, Nvidia looks unstoppable.
Its guidance for the fourth quarter calls for another surge in revenue to $37.5 billion, up 70% from the quarter a year ago even as "demand greatly exceeds supply. Huang has described a vision for the future that has Nvidia's technology at the center of AI factories -- data centers tasked with powering artificial intelligence applications -- and companies of all stripes are racing to get to that future.
Nvidia's stock pulled back slightly in after-hours trading Wednesday, but that seemed to be more of a reflection of the stock's valuation and management's guidance. However, that misreads the business. Based on its run-rate EPS, the stock trades at a P/E ratio of 45, and its profits are likely to soar over the next year. Relative to its growth rate, the stock doesn't look overpriced.
Nvidia remains in the driver's seat of the AI revolution, and the stock continues to look like a screaming buy.
