Nvidia Q3 earnings and sales beat estimates; Q4 sales outlook well ahead of expectations
Unlike Q2, data center revenues handily beat estimates, and management guided for sales to rise $8 billion from Q3 to Q4.
Nvidia is reminding everyone how great it is to be the stock at the center of the AI boom, posting Q3 sales and earnings beats along with a very robust Q4 revenue outlook.
For the three months ended October 26, the chip designer reported:
Sales growth accelerated to 62.5% year-on-year, breaking a six-quarter streak of deceleration.
“Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out,” CEO Jensen Huang said.
Looking ahead to the current quarter, management offered the following outlook:
Shares, which ended the day up about 3%, are building on those gains in the after-hours session.
“Tonight the markets and tech stocks got a pop the champagne moment with Nvidia's robust earnings and guidance,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
Appetite for Nvidia’s chips isn’t really in question in the short term: on October 28, Huang said the company had already received more than $500 billion in orders for its Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips through 2026. And announcements since then, like this week’s partnership with Microsoft and Anthropic as well as Nvidia’s participation in Brookfield’s newly launched AI infrastructure fund, are poised to swell that pipeline of future sales even further. On the conference call, the company will likely face questions about stresses in parts of the AI supply chain and if those will hamper its ability to deliver on orders or weigh on margins.
Shares slid after Nvidia reported second-quarter results in late August as data center revenues were slightly shy of estimates despite firm demand, hinting that the real issue at the time was boosting production to meet that appetite.
At the time, Huang said Blackwell Ultra was “ramping at full speed” and that “we expect to have a much more mature and fully scaled-up supply chain” by the time its Rubin platform was ready for prime time. For this quarter at least, Huang appears to have answered some of those nascent doubts.
These strong results are also boosting many AI-adjacent stocks, from other chip companies, to neoclouds, to data center firms.
