Nvidia’s record $57B revenue and upbeat forecast quiets AI bubble talk

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang struck a bullish tone in the company’s third-quarter earnings. And based on the company’s results, there may be reason to.

Nvidia reported revenue of $57 billion in the third quarter, 62% higher compared to the same quarter last year. The company’s net income on a GAAP basis was $32 billion, 65% higher year-over-year. Both revenue and profit results beat Wall Street expectations.

The revenue picture shows a company booming thanks largely to its data center business. Revenue generated by Nvidia’s data center business was a record $51.2 billion, up 25% from the previous quarter and up 66% from a year ago. The remaining $5.8 billion in revenue came from Nvidia’s gaming business with $4.2 billion, followed by sales in professional visualization and automotive.

Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress noted in a statement to shareholders its data center business has been fueled by an acceleration of computing, powerful AI models, and agentic applications. During the company’s Q3 call, Kress said in this past quarter, the company announced AI factory and infrastructure projects amounting to an aggregate of 5 million GPUs.

“This demand spans every market, CSPs, sovereigns, modern builders enterprises and super computing centers, and includes multiple landmark build outs,” Kress said.

Blackwell Ultra, a GPU unveiled in March and available in several configurations, has been particularly strong and is now the leader within the company. Previous versions of the Blackwell architecture also saw continued strong demand, according to the company.

Huang said sales of its Blackwell GPU chips “are off the charts.”

“Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out,” Huang said in the company’s Q3 earnings statement. “Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference — each growing exponentially. We’ve entered the virtuous cycle of AI. The AI ecosystem is scaling fast — with more new foundation model makers, more AI startups, across more industries, and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once.”

Kress did note that the company’s shipments of H20, a data center GPU designed for generative AI and high-performance computing, were 50 million, a disappointing result due to its inability to sell to China.

“Sizable purchase orders never materialized in the quarter due to geopolitical issues and the increasingly competitive market in China,,” Kress noted on the earnings call. “While we were disappointed in the current state that prevents us from shipping more competitive data center compute products to China, we are committed to continued engagement with the U.S. and China governments, and will continue to advocate for America’s ability to compete around the world.”

Importantly, Nvidia is forecasting more growth with a projected revenue of $65 billion in the fourth quarter, helping push its share price up more than 4% in after-hours trading.

The upshot, at least in Huang’s view: forget about the bubble, there is only growth.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Jensen said during the company’s earnings call. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”