Nvidia Stock Price: Quarterly Profit Reaches $58.3 Billion, Up From Just $2 Billion Three Years Ago

Nvidia stock price wobbled in after-hours trading in New York on Wednesday, even as the chipmaker reported a quarterly profit of $58.3 billion (£43.4 billion) and another set of record-beating results that underline its dominance at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom.

On Wednesday, Nvidia said revenue for its latest fiscal first quarter rose 85% year on year to $81.62 billion (£60.72 billion), compared with $44.01 billion (£32.74 billion) in the same period a year earlier. Net income jumped to $58.32 billion (£43.39 billion), or $2.39 (£1.78) per share, up from $18.78 billion (£13.97 billion), or $0.76 (£0.57) per share.

Excluding one‑off items, earnings came in at $1.87 (£1.39) a share, comfortably ahead of the $1.75 (£1.30) that Wall Street analysts had pencilled in, according to FactSet.

The company also set out an upbeat forecast. For the current quarter, Nvidia expects revenue of about $91 billion (£61.7 billion), while analysts had been looking for roughly $87.29 billion (£64.94 billion). That guidance implies sales will again be close to double last year's level, a pace of expansion more commonly associated with start‑ups than with a $5.4 trillion (£4.02 trillion) giant.

Nvidia Stock Price Shrugs At Eye‑Watering AI Windfall

Yet the Nvidia stock price response was subdued. The shares closed up 1.3% at $223.47 (£166.24) in regular trading, before slipping back to about $222.12 (£165.24) after the numbers landed, as some investors took profits and others fretted over whether even these eye‑watering figures can keep up with expectations that have been ratcheted higher every quarter.

It can be recalled that Nvidia has beaten analyst forecasts consistently since its high‑end GPUs became the default choice for training and running large language models around three years ago.

This quarter was no exception: the company topped estimates on both profit and revenue, raised its dividend and laid out an aggressive buyback. It also signalled that AI infrastructure spending, already around $1 trillion (£740 billion) a year by its reckoning, could climb to between $3 trillion (£2.23 trillion) and $4 trillion (£2.98 trillion) annually by 2030.

Chief executive Jensen Huang framed the moment in typically sweeping terms, calling the rapid build‑out of AI data centres 'the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.'

He has taken to describing these sites as 'AI factories', arguing that they now produce economically valuable digital work in much the same way as traditional plants turn out cars or steel.

Data Centres Drive Nvidia Stock Price In AI Arms Race

The real engine behind the Nvidia stock price over the past three years has been its data centre business. In the most recent quarter, revenue from data centres surged 92% to about $75 billion (£55.79 billion), accounting for nearly all of the company's sales.

That compares with $39.11 billion (£29.09 billion) from data centres in the same quarter a year earlier, underlining just how tightly Nvidia's fortunes are tied to the AI arms race.

According to chief financial officer Colette Kress, hyperscalers — the giant cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google — made up roughly half of data centre revenue. The remaining 50% came from a mix of AI cloud platforms, industrial and enterprise customers and sovereign buyers, a group that includes governments looking to build their own AI capacity.

Nvidia confirmed that it did not book any revenue from sales of its Hopper‑generation products into China during the quarter.

Nvidia Stock Price: New Reporting Structure Aims To Reassure Investors Over 'Parabolic' AI Demand

The company is also reshaping how it reports its business to reflect that shift. Sales are now split into two broad lines: Data Center and Edge Computing.

Data Center covers hyperscalers, AI clouds, industrial clients and enterprise demand.

Edge Computing is where Nvidia groups what it calls 'agentic and physical AI', from PCs and game consoles to AI‑RAN base stations, robotics and automotive chips.

Investors such as Ben Barringer at Quilter Cheviot have welcomed the greater transparency, arguing that breaking out hyperscaler‑linked revenue will make it easier to track Nvidia's share of that crucial market.

Alongside the revenue surge, operating expenses jumped 49% to $7.75 billion (£5.77 billion) as Nvidia ploughed money into research, product development and additional capacity. The company is trying to keep up with what Huang described to analysts as 'parabolic' demand.

Rivals Close In As Nvidia Stock Price Tests Its Limits

Nvidia stock price performance is also starting to be judged against a more crowded field. Cerebras, which floated last week, is pitching a radically different AI processor design that it claims delivers faster performance than conventional GPU clusters.

Amazon has told investors its in‑house chip operation has reached an annual revenue run rate of more than $20 billion (£14.88 billion) with triple‑digit percentage growth, and has signed capacity deals via AWS to supply 2 gigawatts of Trainium chips to OpenAI and up to 5 gigawatts of current and future Trainium hardware to Anthropic.

On Tuesday, Google used its I/O developer conference in Mountain View to tout its latest TPU 8i and TPU 8t processors — the former optimised for running AI software, the latter for training models — and has agreed a multigeneration, multigigawatt TPU supply pact with Anthropic, according to The Information.

Investors, meanwhile, are wrestling with the sheer scale Nvidia has already reached. Barringer describes the company as 'the behemoth' of its sector and notes that, while it is best known for GPUs, it is also the biggest player in CPUs by sales, with around $20 billion (£14.88 billion) of CPU revenue.

In his view, that size cuts both ways: the larger Nvidia becomes, the harder it is to deliver the sort of percentage gains the market has grown used to, and 'thus the market will be more punishing.'

The muted reaction came after more than three years of near-relentless gains in Nvidia's valuation, during which the California-based group has gone from a specialist graphics firm to the world's most valuable listed company and the defining proxy for investor enthusiasm about generative AI.

Over that period, quarterly profit has exploded from about $2 billion (£1.49 billion) to $58.3 billion (£43.4 billion), while demand for its high-end processors has forced a wholesale rebuild of the world's data centre infrastructure.