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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nvidia on Wednesday reported a surge in fourth-quarter profit and sales as demand for its specialized Blackwell chips, which power artificial intelligence systems, continued to grow, sending the company's stock higher after hours.
For the three months that ended Jan. 26, the tech giant based in Santa Clara, California, posted revenue of $39.3 billion, up 12% from the previous quarter and 78% from one year ago. Adjusted for one-time items, it earned 89 cents a share.
“Demand for Blackwell is amazing as reasoning AI adds another scaling law — increasing compute for training makes models smarter and increasing compute for long thinking makes the answer smarter,” Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang said in a statement.
Nvidia has ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers, Huang said, “achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter.”
“AI is advancing at light speed as agentic AI and physical AI set the stage for the next wave of AI to revolutionize the largest industries,” he said.
Wednesday’s earnings report topped Wall Street expectations. Analysts had been expecting adjusted earnings of 85 cents a share on revenue of $38.1 billion, according to FactSet. Nvidia reported net income of $22.06 billion in the fourth quarter, beating analysts’ predictions of $19.57 billion. The tech giant expected sales to continue to grow, forecasting revenue of around $43 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2026.
Data center sales, which account for much of Nvidia’s revenues, were a core part of that uptick — fourth-quarter revenue was $35.6 billion, up 93% from one year ago.
The growth in the data center market comes as President Donald Trump has talked up a joint venture investing up to $500 billion for infrastructure tied to AI through a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. The Stargate project will start building out data centers and the energy generation needed for the further development of AI, according to the White House. Nvidia is a partner in that project.
On an earnings call Wednesday afternoon, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that fourth-quarter Blackwell sales exceeded the company's expectations.
"We delivered $11 billion of Blackwell architecture revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, the fastest product ramp in our company’s history," Kress said. “Blackwell sales were led by large cloud service providers which represented approximately 50% of our data center revenue.”
The poster child of the AI boom, Nvidia has grown into the second-largest company on Wall Street — it is now worth over $3 trillion — and the stock’s movement carries more weight on the S&P 500 and other indexes than every company except Apple. Two years ago, Nvidia’s market value was below $600 billion.