Nvidia has done it again, beating on the top and bottom line and guiding the current quarter well above Wall Street estimates, yet the share price barely moved. That tepid reaction has become the new normal for the world’s most valuable company, and it tells us exactly how high the bar has been set in the AI trade.
According to Josh Gilbert, Lead Analyst, Middle East at eToro: Revenue of USD$81.6 billion was up 85% on the same quarter last year, with the all-important data centre business pulling in USD$75.2 billion, growth of 92%. For a company of this size to still deliver that level of growth is staggering. Guidance for the July quarter came in at around USD$91 billion, comfortably ahead of the USD$87 billion consensus, while management lifted the quarterly dividend to 25 cents from 1 cent and authorised another USD$80 billion in buybacks. The buyback and dividend hike show that Nvidia wants to keep shareholders on side, even as the eye-watering share price gains of recent years become harder to repeat.
The result also showed that Nvidia’s growth story is broadening well beyond GPUs. Networking revenue came in at USD$14.8 billion, comfortably ahead of the USD$12.7 billion the Street was looking for. That’s key, because as AI factories get built out at scale, the networking layer can become a serious growth engine in its own right. At the same time, we’re also seeing the pivot into CPUs, driven by the build-out of agentic AI workloads, the next layer of the AI boom. Nvidia is still in pole position in this AI trade, but Intel and AMD lead the way on CPUs for now, with both stocks more than doubling this year as investors price in the shift. As agentic AI takes off, the value is going to spread across more of the compute stack, not just GPUs.
This result tells us that AI isn’t just a one-year story, it’s a story with many years ahead. The market has grown accustomed to perfection from Nvidia, and although we got that today, much of it was already priced in. The lens investors should be using from here is that the AI boom still has plenty of runway, but the winners’ list is going to get longer.
