Nvidia delivers another quarter of stellar growth

NEW YORK

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia has announced another quarter of astounding quarterly growth as investors try to decipher whether technology’s latest craze is overblown hyperbole or a springboard into a new era of prosperity and productivity.

The results for the November-January period blew past the analyst projections that shape investors’ perceptions, as has been the case since Nvidia’s high-end chips emerged as AI’s best building blocks three years ago.

Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue surged 73 percent from the previous year to $68.1 billion while its profit nearly doubled to roughly $43 billion.

The company also provided a forecast exceeding analyst projections while its CEO Jensen Huang reinforced the demand for the company's chips is still “skyrocketing." That description feeds into Huang's thesis that the AI boom is still in the early stages of a buildout that will reshape society. If Nvidia hits its revenue target for the February-April period, it will translate into a 77 percent increase from last year — a sign that the company's already phenomenal growth rate is still accelerating.

“AI is here, AI is not going to go back,” Huang said during a conference call with analysts. “AI is only going to only get better from here.”

Despite the stellar results and still-rosy outlook, many investors still evidently are worried about a jarring comedown after a three-year boom that has seen Nvidia's market value soar from $400 billion at the end of 2022 to nearly $4.8 trillion now. 

Nvidia has regularly cleared the bar set by analysts in the past three years, often by a wide margin, but that hasn’t always been enough to satisfy investors who have become increasingly skeptical about whether AI will justify the trillions of dollars that are being spent to develop the technology.