Nvidia’s sales of the computing chips powering artificial intelligence have surged beyond the lofty bar set by stock market analysts.
The performance may ease recent jitters about a Big Tech boom turning into a bust that topples the world’s most valuable company.
The results announced late on Wednesday provided an update on the frenzied spending on AI technology that has been fuelling both the stock market and much of the overall US economy since OpenAI released ChatGPT three years ago.
Nvidia has been by far the biggest beneficiary of the run-up because its processors have become indispensable for building the AI factories that are needed to enable what is supposed to be the most dramatic shift in technology since Apple released the iPhone in 2007.
But in the past few weeks there has been a rising tide of sentiment that the high expectations for AI may have become too frothy, setting the stage for a jarring comedown that could be just as dramatic as the ascent that transformed Nvidia from a company worth less than 400 billion dollars three years ago to one worth 4.5 trillion dollars today.
Nvidia’s report for its fiscal third quarter covering the August-October period now seems likely to elicit a sigh of relief among those fretting about a worst-case scenario.
The company, run by chief executive Jensen Huang, saw its stock price gain more than 2% in Wednesday’s extended trading after the numbers came out.
