AI bubble? Jensen Huang doesn’t know her.
The Nvidia CEO said on Wednesday that the chipmaker he co-founded excels at every phase of AI, and that the world is currently at a tipping point that Nvidia is uniquely positioned to preside over.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.“
“The transition to generative AI is transformational and necessary, supercharging existing applications and business models, and the transition to agentic and physical AI will be revolutionary, giving rise to new applications, companies, products and services,” Huang continued. “Nvidia is unlike any other accelerator.”
Huang’s comments come amid white-knuckled fears among some investors over an AI bubble and the potential cascade effects should it burst, which recently drove down global stock prices and saw Nvidia’s market value tumble 10% in three weeks. But on Wednesday, Nvidia announced soaring revenue of $57 billion, bashing past analyst’s expectations as sales rose 22% from the previous quarter and 62% from a year ago. Leading the way was data center revenue of $51. 2 billion, up 25% over last quarter and 66% year over year, confirming Nvidia’s dominant position as the key supplier for hyperscalers.
In comparison, in the second quarter Nvidia saw total revenue of $46.7 billion and data center revenue of roughly $41 billion.
Chief financial officer Colette Kress told analysts that Nvidia expects to benefit from $3 trillion to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure spending by 2030, although she warned that Nvidia needs access to China to remain competitive. Sales of Nvidia’s flagship GPUs are blocked in China due to restrictions and bans by U.S. and Chinese authorities. Kress said Nvidia’s forecasting assumed no revenue from China for the current quarter, same as the past two quarters.
“America must win the support of every developer and be the platform of choice for every commercial business—including those in China,” said Kress.
The three ‘massive platform shifts’
Huang told analysts the world is currently undergoing three massive platform shifts all at once, implying that the convergence was a rebuttal to the idea that current spending and investment represented a bubble. He said that this was the first time such a convergence of shifts has occurred “since the dawn of Moore’s Law,” which refers to the observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that chips get twice as powerful every two years as technology improves.
The first transition involves the shift from general purpose computing to accelerated computing. Huang said Nvidia has a 20-year ongoing investment in so-called “accelerated software” libraries, which positions the company firmly at the top when it comes to science and engineering simulations, computer graphics, and data processing.
The second shift is all about generative AI, which will drive “substantial revenue gains for hyperscalers,” said Huang. GenAI will eventually replace machine learning across search, rankings, systems that involve recommendations, advertising tech, and content moderation, he added.
The third wave involves agentic AI systems that can reason, plan, and carry out coding tasks. Huang pointed to what he called the world’s pioneers of agentic AI, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google, Tesla and others.
“These systems mark the next frontier of computing,” said Huang. Nvidia’s “singular architecture” plays a key role in all three platform shifts—and, as he went on to not, virtually all of the players in those shifts are Nvidia customers.
Strategic Partners
Nvidia’s earnings blockbuster comes one day after the chip manufacturer announced a partnership with Anthropic to collaborate on design and engineering, and an expanded partnership with Microsoft to offer expanded access to Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.
Kress said Nvidia will “continue to invest strategically while preserving our disciplined approach to cash flow management.”
Nvidia has raised eyebrows among skeptical investors with its equity investments in AI and data infrastructure projects and firms that are part of its ecosystem of customers. Nvidia disclosed several such investments in its most recent Form 13F filing, on Nov. 14. They include a $3.3 billion holding in CoreWeave, a cloud infrastructure provider and Nvidia customer, and a $177 million investment in data center maker Applied Digital Corp. Nvidia also has investments in chip design company ARM Holdings of $155.8 million, and cloud and AI infrastructure company Nebius Group NV of $133.7 million. The company has holdings in AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals, ($37.6 million), and autonomous driving tech company WeRide, of $17.2 million.
Huang said the investments are all in the name of technical partnerships with “some of the best and most brilliant companies in the world.” He said some of the investments are in “once-in-a-generation” companies.
“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,” said Huang in a statement. “AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once.”