Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that artificial intelligence is gaining on humans.
Speaking at The New York Times’ annual DealBook summit, Huang said that if artificial general intelligence (AGI) is defined as a computer that can complete tests in a “fairly competitive” way to human intelligence, then “within the next five years, you’re going to see, obviously, AIs that can achieve those tests.”
Nvidia’s business is booming because of the surge in demand for high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs) that are needed to train AI models and run hefty workloads across industries like automotive, architecture, electronics, engineering and scientific research as well as for OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Revenue in Nvidia’s fiscal third quarter tripled, while net income climbed to $9.24 billion from $680 million a year earlier.
In the interview Wednesday, Huang recalled delivering “the world’s first AI supercomputer” to OpenAI, after Elon Musk, who co-founded the AI project before departing it in 2018, heard Huang speak about the device at a conference.
“Elon saw it, and he goes, ‘I want one of those’ — he told me about OpenAI,” Huang said. “I delivered the world’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI on that day.”
Regarding the recent chaos surrounding OpenAI, its board structure, and the ousting and subsequent reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, Huang said he hoped things were calming down.
“I’m happy that they’re settled, and I hope they’re settled — it’s a really great team,” Huang said. “It also brings to mind the importance of corporate governance. Nvidia is here 30 years after our founding, we’ve gone through a lot of adversity. If we didn’t set up our company properly, who knows what would have been.”
Huang predicted that competition in the AI space will lead to the emergence of off-the-shelf AI tools that companies in different industries will tune according to their needs, from chip design and software creation to drug discovery and radiology.
Huang was asked onstage to rank the success of various companies in the AI market.
“I’m not going to rank my friends,” he said. “I’ll admit it, I want to, but I’m not going to do it.”
One reason the tech industry is still years away from AGI, Huang said, is that although machine learning is currently skilled at tasks like recognition and perception, it can’t yet perform multistep reasoning, which is a top priority for companies and researchers.
“Everybody’s working on it,” Huang said.
And the technology is moving forward very quickly.
“There’s no question that the rate of progress is high,” Huang said. “What we realize today is that of course, what we can do today with these models and intelligence are related, but not the same.”
Oracle’s Federal Electronic Health Record experienced a nation-wide outage on Tuesday, the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed to CNBC.
The agency said “all users” of the company’s Federal EHR, including the VA, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were impacted. Six VA medical centers, 26 community clinics, and remote VA sites experienced disruptions, the agency said.
“Affected VA medical facilities followed standard contingency procedures during the outage to ensure continuity of care for Veterans,” a VA spokesperson said in a statement Thursday.
An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care.
Oracle is one of the largest EHR vendors thanks to it’s $28 billion acquisition of the medical records giant Cerner in 2022.
The company’s Federal EHR initially started experiencing issues at around 8:37 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, the VA said. Users reported that the software froze and they were unable to access applications. Access was restored and cleared by 2:05 p.m. Eastern that day after Oracle restarted the system.
Oracle is carrying out an investigation to determine what caused the outage, the VA said. Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The outage marks Oracle’s latest stumble in a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the VA, which has been marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.
Four VA facilities in Michigan are slated to deploy Oracle’s Federal EHR in 2026.
In October, Oracle unveiled a brand-new EHR equipped with fresh cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities. The early adopter program for the software begins this year, though it’s not clear if the VA has plans to utilize it.
Oracle is slated to report third-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings on Monday.
Broadcom reported first-quarter earnings on Thursday that topped analysts’ expectations, and the chipmaker offered strong guidance for the current quarter. The stock jumped 16% in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: $1.60 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
Revenue: $14.92 billion vs. $14.61 billion expected
Broadcom said it expects about $14.9 billion in second-quarter revenue, higher than the $14.76 billion forecast by Wall Street analysts. Revenue in the last quarter rose 25% from $11.96 billion a year earlier.
The company said net income increased to $5.5 billion, or $1.14 per share, from $1.33 billion, or 28 cents per share, in the same period last year.
Broadcom’s artificial intelligence business is at the center of the company’s recent boom, which saw its stock price more than double last year. The company is one of the primary data center infrastructure vendors for AI, working both on Google’s custom AI chips as well as providing essential components for networking thousands of other chips together to develop advanced AI software.
Prior to the after-hours pop, the stock was down about 23% so far in 2025, as investors rotate out of risk partly due to concern about President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Broadcom said it recorded $4.1 billion in AI revenue during the first quarter, which is 77% higher on a year-over-year basis. Those sales are reported as part of Broadcom’s semiconductor solutions business, which grew 11% on an annual basis to $8.21 billion during the quarter.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in a statement that the company expects “continued strength in AI semiconductor revenue,” reaching a projected $4.4 billion in the second quarter.
In December, Broadcom said it was developing custom AI chips with three large cloud customers. Tan said on Thursday that in addition to those customers, it had “deeply engaged” with two other hyperscalers, and are working with four other potential customers to develop their own custom AI chips.
Tan said that Broadcom closely chooses partners for developing custom AI chips who can deploy the resulting product in large quantities. “To put it bluntly, we don’t do it for startups,” Tan said.
The other major part of Broadcom’s revenue comes from its infrastructure software division, which includes software from the company’s acquisition of VMware in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2023. Broadcom said it saw $6.7 billion in software sales during the quarter, a 47% increase on an annual basis.
Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, speaks during an interview with CNBC on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, October 20, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares slid 19% in extended trading on Thursday as the data center equipment maker issued quarterly and full-year guidance that came in below consensus.
Here’s how the company did in the fiscal first quarter in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: 49 cents adjusted vs. 49 cents expected
Revenue: $7.85 billion vs. $7.82 billion expected
HPE’s revenue rose 16% year over year in the quarter ending on Jan. 31, according to a statement. The company was left with profit of $598 million, or 44 cents per share, up from $387 million, or 29 cents per share, in the same quarter a year earlier. The adjusted earnings per share excludes stock-based compensation.
“We could have executed better,” CEO Antonio Neri said on a conference call with analysts. The company had higher than normal inventory for artificial intelligence servers because of a shift to next-generation Blackwell graphics processing units from Nvidia.
The backlog for AI systems rose 29% quarter over quarter to $3.1 billion. Total server revenue totaled $4.29 billion.
HPE dealt with extensive discounting in the market while selling traditional servers during the quarter, finance chief Marie Myers said. As the quarter progressed, HPE moved to limit travel and discretionary spending, she said.
“We expect pricing adjustments may negatively impact top-line growth in the near term,” Myers said.
The company said it would implement a cost-cutting program involving layoffs over the next 18 months that will lead to $350 million in gross savings by the 2027 fiscal year. Around 2,500 employees will be affected, a spokesperson said, representing about 5% of the workforce when also factoring in expected attrition. At the end of October, HPE employed 61,000 people, according to its most recent annual report.
In January, the U.S. Justice Department filed in a federal district court to stop HPE from acquiring Juniper Networks. HPE announced the proposed $14 billion deal in January 2024. The court expects a trial to begin in July, according to the statement. The deal should close by October 2025, HPE said. In December, the company had said the transaction would be done in early 2025.
HPE called for 28 cents to 34 cents in adjusted earnings per share for the fiscal second quarter, with revenue coming in between $7.2 billion and $7.6 billion. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had looked for 50 cents per share on $7.93 billion in revenue.
For the 2025 fiscal year, HPE sees $1.70 to $1.90 in adjusted earnings per share. Analysts polled by LSEG had predicted $2.13 per share.
HPE expects to update its prices to reflect higher expenses from U.S. tariffs, Neri said, adding that he has not perceived any business deterioration from President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
As of Thursday’s close, HPE shares were up about 2% so far in 2025, while the S&P 500 index was down 2%.