Nvidia’s latest quarterly results and plans to boost returns failed to impress the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street on Wednesday.
According to the Financial Times, the chipmaker forecast $91 billion in sales for the current quarter, ahead of average expectations of $86 billion but below the rosiest guesses.
It announced another $80 billion in share buybacks and lifted its quarterly dividend to $0.25 a share from $0.01.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang hailed the “extraordinary speed” and “parabolic” trajectory of AI data centre investment, but shares slipped 1.3 per cent after hours.
Nvidia sits at the centre of the AI boom, which means its numbers now wobble markets in ways once reserved for central banks.
The Futurum Group chief executive Daniel Newman said the “apathetic” investor reaction reflected doubts about whether Nvidia could keep up its growth.
Newman said: “There’s a law of large numbers here: Nvidia starts to become more like an Apple. A safe place to invest. With investors chasing the outsized returns, they are looking at other AI players that might have more market-cap growth potential.”
Nvidia has ridden a global AI infrastructure binge as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta push spending plans to $725 billion in 2026. The outfit’s earnings have become a health check for the AI bubble, with tech-linked shares powering much of the wider US market’s gains.
Nvidia alone drove nearly a fifth of the S&P 500’s rise this year, according to Bloomberg data.
Even so, its 18 per cent rise this year has lagged the 65 per cent climb in the wider SOX index of US chip stocks. Revenue grew 85 per cent from the previous year to $81.6 billion in the quarter ending April, beating estimates for the 15th consecutive quarter.
Data centre revenue, tied to Nvidia’s AI infrastructure chip systems, almost doubled year on year to $75.2 billion. Net income rose to $58.3 billion.
Gross margin was 75 per cent, with Nvidia expecting it to stay roughly there in the current quarter. That was below the 75.7 per cent analysts expected, feeding worries about costs as memory makers struggle to satisfy AI demand.
Nvidia generated $50.3 billion in net cash from operating activities, up from $27.4 billion a year earlier. Huang has been under pressure to fling more of the swelling cash pile back at shareholders.
The company still poured vast sums into dealmaking, with net cash used in investing activities hitting $26.4 billion, up from $5.2 billion.
Visible Alpha head of research Melissa Otto said the larger buybacks and dividend were “really fantastic,” but investors cared more about growth. Otto said analysts expect revenue growth to “meaningfully drop off again” to about 36 per cent in the next fiscal year.
“Those years of the massive upwards revisions may be behind Nvidia now,” she said.
Nvidia faces more pressure from customers including Google and Amazon, and rivals such as AMD and Intel, pushing alternatives to its graphics processing units.
Investors wanted to know whether Nvidia was spreading its customer base beyond a small club of hyperscalers.
For the first time, the company split its data centre revenue to show roughly equal takings from six Big Tech outfits and other clients. Other clients include smaller data centre groups such as CoreWeave, as well as industrial and enterprise customers. Nvidia did not include potential AI chip sales to China in its forecast.
Huang joined US President Donald Trump’s visit to China last week to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, raising hopes that Beijing might soften its stance on H200 imports.
The White House cleared those chip sales late last year, but Nvidia is still waiting for Chinese authorities to let domestic tech companies proceed. US officials said semiconductors were not a major topic in the talks.
During Huang’s visit, China banned imports of Nvidia’s China-specific gaming chip, the RTX 5090D V2.
