Nvidia's latest quarter shows signs of slowing AI chip sales amid concerns of tech bubble

Key Points

• Nvidia is set to release a quarterly report that will help determine whether the current stock market enthusiasm for AI is genuine or as inflated as the late 1990s dot-com bubble.
• The company has seen its market value soar past $4 trillion, but recent reports indicate a slowdown in growth, with projected revenue growth down from 122% to 53% year-over-year.
• Despite the challenges and speculation about an AI bubble, major players like Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are investing over $325 billion in AI this year, creating significant demand for Nvidia's chips.
• Nvidia's growth has been impacted by geopolitical issues, particularly a ban on AI chip sales to China, which is expected to cost the company around $8 billion in sales for the last quarter.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Nvidia’s sales of its artificial intelligence chipsets remained a hot commodity in during the company's latest quarter, but the demand wasn't quite feverish enough to ease recent worries that AI craze may be fading.

The results announced Wednesday were hotly anticipated because Nvidia has emerged as key barometer of a two-year-old AI boom that has been propelling the stock market to new heights. The Silicon Valley chipmaker also became the first publicly traded company to achieve a $4 trillion market value.

In recent weeks, though, recent research reports and comments by prominent tech executives have raised investor fears that the AI mania has been overblown.

And now Nvidia’s latest numbers covering the May-July period may feed those perceptions because the sales of the company’s processors, which are indispensable components that power the technology in data centers scattered around the world, appear to be decelerating slightly faster than investors thought they would.

The AI chips are part of Nvidia's data center division, which posted revenue of $41.1 billion, a 56% increase from the same time last year, but below the analyst forecast of $41.3 billion, according to FactSet Research.

Even so, Nvidia's profit of $26.4 billion, or $1.08 per share, was higher than analysts predicted, as was its total revenue of $46.7 billion — also a 56% increase from the last year.

Nvidia signaled it believes more good things are still to come by forecasting revenue of $54 billion for the August-October period, slightly above what analysts had been envisioning for the quarter.

But Nvidia's stock still slipped 2% in extended trading after the fiscal second quarter report came out, indicating the performance wasn't enough to allay investors' fears. A letdown was almost inevitable, given the stock price has increased by more than 10-fold during the past two and a half years.

“Saying the stock was priced for perfection would be an enormous understatement, as it was, in fact, in need of another massive beat,” said Investing.com analyst Thomas Monteiro.

Nvidia would have fared better if President Donald Trump hadn't imposed a ban that prevented Nvidia from selling its AI chips in China during the quarter. But investors had already been forewarned the restrictions would cost the company about $8 billion in sales from May through July, so that challenge was already in reflected in Nvidia's stock price.

Trump took the China handcuffs off of Nvidia earlier this month in return for a 15% cut of the company’s sales in that country — a compromise that is expected to help boost revenue during the upcoming months although it's unclear how quickly that will happen.

While investor fretted, Nvidia executives remained bullish during a conference call with analysts. Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer, estimated $3 trillion to $4 trillion will be spent on AI technology through the end of this decade, with a significant amount of that money expected to be earmarked for Nvidia's chipsets.