Chipmaker Nvidia said sales and profits more than doubled last year amid an AI boom. The tech titan last night reported that revenues soared 114 per cent to £103billion and earnings were up 145 per cent to £57.5billion in the 12 months to January 26.
But all eyes will be on Nvidia’s share price when trading opens in New York today after a turbulent start to the year. The company’s stock hit an all-time-high of $153 in January before the launch of Chinese AI platform DeepSeek last month triggered a major tech sell off.
Shares in Nvidia, which makes semiconductors that power AI, crashed nearly 18 per cent on the day DeepSeek launched – wiping £500billion off its stock market valuation. It was the largest single-day valuation loss in stock market history. That sparked a rout among the rest of the Magnificent Seven stocks – Apple, Amazon, Google’s owner Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta, Microsoft and Tesla.
Nvidia, led by boss Jensen Huang (pictured) reported that revenues soared 114% to £103bn and earnings were up 145% to £57.5bn. Investors were last night pinning their hopes on upbeat Nvidia results to put the brakes on the Silicon Valley slump. Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang said demand for the company’s new Blackwell chips has been ‘amazing’ and said the company had ‘successfully ramped up’ production.
The company reported revenue of £31billion for the fourth quarter, beating Wall Street analyst expectations of £30billion. Nvidia said it expects sales in the three months to the end of April to hit a new high of £33.9billion. The results came amid growing anxiety on Wall Street about a slowdown in big tech earnings growth and the future of AI.
Founded in 1993, Nvidia has been a major winner in the AI boom following the debut of ChatGPT in 2022. The California-headquartered firm’s valuation soared to $3 trillion last year and it briefly overtook iPhone maker Apple as the world’s largest company in the summer.
But the sector was rocked last month by the launch of China’s DeepSeek, which introduced a new AI model at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek said it had built an AI training model using Nvidia’s cheaper chips for under £5million - a fraction of the fortune that US tech firms were spending.
Its successful use of these cheaper chips in its AI app called into question other tech firms’ huge outlay on Nvidia’s more advanced – and expensive – semiconductors that are also deployed to train language models. And investor anxiety spiked again this week after reports that Microsoft – one of Nvidia’s biggest customers – was cancelling leases with private data centre operators.
