Nvidia’s Profit Jumps 80 Percent as Company Rides Tech’s AI Boom

When Nvidia lost $600 billion in market value in a single day last month, it was because some investors feared for the future of the artificial intelligence chipmaker. DeepSeek, a Chinese start-up, said it had made its A.I. systems with a small fraction of the A.I. chips used by other companies, and at a small fraction of the cost.

On Wednesday, Nvidia showed those fears were overblown, even as the breakneck pace of its growth slows. The company, a bellwether for A.I., said purchases of its A.I. chips lifted its total revenue by 78 percent from a year earlier to $39.33 billion during the three months that ended in January. Profit rose 80 percent to $22.09 billion.

In previous quarters, Nvidia reported that sales and profits had more than doubled. But continuing to deliver those kinds of gains has become more difficult as its sales and profits rise. (For a business like Nvidia, it is common for the growth rate to slow after a period of phenomenal increases, a phenomenon known as the law of large numbers.)

Nvidia’s quarterly results exceeded Wall Street analysts’ expectations for $38.32 billion in sales and $21.08 billion in profit. The company projected that revenue in the current quarter would rise 65 percent from a year ago to $43 billion, a slowdown from the previous quarter but about $1 billion more than Wall Street had predicted.

Shares in Nvidia were almost flat in after-hours trading, following the company’s 3.7 percent gain on Wednesday. It remains the world’s second-most-valuable publicly traded company, behind Apple.

Nvidia’s business has been buoyed by the biggest tech companies’ nonstop spending on A.I. data centers. After pouring tens of billions of dollars into new infrastructure last year, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have said they will each spend $65 billion to $100 billion or more this year.