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Nvidia (NVDA) reported first quarter adjusted earnings of $0.81 per share. Excluding an H20 charge and related tax impacts, adjusted earnings were $0.96 per share. Revenue of $44.1 billion was better than the expected $43.29 billion. Data center revenue was $39.1 billion versus the $39.22 billion estimate.
In the video above, Yahoo Finance Anchors Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton are joined by Futurum CEO Daniel Newman and TECHnalysis Research president Bob O'Donnell to discuss the results and comments from the conference call.
Check out Yahoo Finance's Nvidia earnings coverage here.
Let's recap Nvidia's numbers now. The company reported solid earnings after the bell, revenue rising 69% from a year earlier to $44.1 billion, that's ahead of analyst estimates on average. Nvidia did take a smaller than forecast 4 and a half billion dollar write-down related to increased restrictions of sales of its chips into China, including that charge, earnings per share coming in at 81 cents. That also beat comparable estimates. Sales in the current quarter will amount to 45 billion dollars, plus or minus 2%, that's roughly in line with most analyst estimates, and that does include the loss of $8 billion in revenue from sales of those H20 chips, which it had been selling into China. And Jensen Wong talking about that Chinese market for AI being around $50 billion and highlighting the disadvantage that he believes not only the company is now put at because of these export controls, but that the industry more broadly is facing as a result of that as well. So those were the numbers, Josh. I'm seeing a positive reaction obviously in the after hours to those.
Yeah, I'm just seeing this post by Jean Monster here who's a tech analyst and everybody on the on the panel knows. Monster is is making the case that he thinks the stock should be trading higher than it is here than 4%. The reason he says that if you back out the impact of the curbs, he says year-over-year revenue growth in April would have been 79% and the guide for July would have been 76%. Latest evidence, he says the company's growth will be higher for longer.
All right, let's bring our panel back here. We've got Bob O'Donnell of Technalysis. We've got Dan Newman here as well. So guys, really hearing a couple things on that call. Really the emphasis that we've been hearing now kind of since the beginning of this latest wave of Nvidia. We can do inference. We can do inference. We can do inference. Can you guys do inference? Did you mention you could do inference? So they're really emphasizing that their chips are well suited for this current stage of where we are in AI. And then of course the message from Jensen Wong himself that export controls are a bad deal for everyone concerned he seems to think.
Well, and the other theme he brought up, of course, was a theme we've heard a lot before which is sovereign AI, right? You know, and doing sovereign AI wherever we can. So look, I mean,
And sovereign AI just means countries doing AI for themselves.
Yes. Literally, that's all it means. It's it's a very fancy sounding way. Like governments doing AI. Exactly. Um, but look, I mean the, I think all the positive points of of opportunity for growth are still there. I I found it very interesting actually that all the customer examples they talked about actually were enterprises. Remember which is something I I'm like, even though the absolute numbers, I think, are still small for enterprise. Those were the examples they gave. They also actually gave a number of examples around robotics, which we also know is like basically just about zero revenue yet. So I think clearly the company is trying to tell the story beyond obviously that yes, we can do inference and that we need to be in China. You know, hello President Trump, you're listening. We need to be in China. You're cutting us off from $50 billion. Please don't do that. Um, then it's like, and here are the other growth opportunities. So I think they're trying to set the stage and tell the story around where those growth opportunities are by focusing on some examples, um, you know, from those different sectors.
Dan, I'm interested to get your take. We were chewing over this earlier about the opportunity in the Middle East. And and one I wanted to get your sense of, is it possible one reason investors got so excited when they saw Jensen Wong over there and he's making these deals in Saudi Arabia and the UAE because did it potentially address one issue that the Nvidia skeptics on this show have brought forward? And you'll hear this. They'll say, well, maybe 2025 is really the high watermark in AI spend. This is peak AI spend. And maybe folks looked at the Middle East and said, well, or maybe there's some really deep pocketed folks who can keep this party going.
Yeah, the AI bubble folks, the ones that said the party's already over are entirely wrong. And they're going to continue to be wrong.
Why do you say that, Dan?
Because we're just in the early stages. When you actually listen to what he, you know, Bob was just talking about the enterprise build out the consumption, we're actually in the very earliest stages. The consumption, the inference opportunity, the reason Jensen's so focused on it is because the trillions of tokens that will be concurrently used to do a genetic or to do humanoids, we haven't even started that. And that's what's going to really create this need for a power and B, more infrastructure. I want to take a quick step back though and talk about China because the Middle East actually proved an important point. And it's that the US is actually on board for AI diffusion around the world and wants US and Western AI to win everywhere, including in complicated regions like the Middle East. China is a different animal. And I think it's interesting because Jensen is saying all the right things for Nvidia. But for the US, I don't know that he's saying the right things. And I don't believe, and I just on the record, I do not believe that China's resolve and China's commitment to building a competitive product has anything to do with whether or not we sell Nvidia into that market. Remember, Chinese is run by the Communist Party. Chinese puts its own national interests first. So even if Nvidia and its stack and its superior software, CUDA, is everywhere in China, at any point Xi Jinping can say no more Nvidia. You are going to switch to CAN, their version of CUDA. And that could happen. Right now they're doing it with the Ascend chips. The Ascend chips are a they are much less capable than even the older hopper chips. And that's the reason they still want them. But they are putting them together. They are building two coal-fired plants per week. They are building an energy capacity to be able to deliver on AI and they understand the next multiple decades of economic leadership are going to sit on winning AI. They're not standing back. They're not sitting idly. But if I'm an Nvidia investor, if I'm a shareholder, or if I'm Jensen, he's saying the exact right things. But if I'm President Trump, I'm still listening to counsel from different sides because in China's resolve is is substantial. It's absolute, and they have no interest in standing by idly and letting the US just have AI.
Yeah, no, and I and I completely agree. I mean, the, you know, the challenge is going to be that China is getting a lot better, right? And those Huawei chips that you were talking about, the Ascend chips, I mean, they are slowly but surely getting better. But you know, just today there was an announcement I saw that Cadence and Synopsis, the big EDA companies, that companies who create the software for designing advanced chips, just got whacked basically and and told, sorry, you can't sell that into China either. So there's a lot of efforts there. I mean, I do find it interesting that in essence, we've heard a couple people throughout the program basically say, hey, we're starting to model Nvidia without China, basically, right? And they're saying, hey, let's what does the world look like if we do that? And then obviously anything they get into China is just gravy, you know, above and beyond that. And so I think we'll probably see some people probably follow that route for a while, and then I think we'll see other people, you know, take different approaches. But it's, you know, it's a big question, um, that, you know, it's going to it's going to take a while to figure out and and you can make strong arguments on on both sides of this.
Remember remember the stakes, Josh, at play are this trade deal. This trade deal is still out there. The Synopsis, Cadence, Siemens, EDA block, anything to slow down. Now, again, protectionism, I would actually go on and say, I do not believe the long-term strategy is to focus on protectionism. But right now, you would have to say, well, if we're not focused on that, then why don't we just give them ASML too? Why don't we give them EUV and advanced lithography and everything else? There's a reason this was done by the Democrats. There's a reason this is being continued by the Republicans. In the end, the US has to win. I think it's a balance of protectionism, and then therefore diffuse our AI everywhere else in the meantime.