Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a keynote address during the Nvidia GTC Artificial Intelligence Conference at SAP Center on March 18, 2024 in San Jose, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Nvidia reported its fourth-straight quarter of triple-digit revenue growth on Wednesday, sailing past estimates on the top and bottom line while also issuing a forecast that topped Wall Street expectations. The company even bolstered its buyback program with a plan to repurchase $50 billion in shares.
But the stock dropped 7% in extended trading.
That’s life for Nvidia, which has ridden the artificial intelligence boom to a $3 trillion market cap, soaring almost nine-fold since the end of 2022 and surpassing every public company other than Apple in valuation. (It topped Apple for a stretch in June.)
In addition to reporting 122% annual revenue growth on Wednesday to over $30 billion, Nvidia said sales in the current period will jump about 80% to roughly $32.5 billion. Analysts were expecting close to $32 billion.
However, Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein, told CNBC before the report came out that “buyside whispers” were closer to $33 billion to $34 billion, meaning Nvidia would have to dramatically surpass analyst estimates in its guidance in order to see a pop.
Rasgon, who recommends buying shares of the chipmaker, said there are no indications that demand is waning for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), the core infrastructure for developing and running AI models.
“There’s still a ton of demand,” Rasgon said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “They’re still shipping everything that they can sell.”
Nvidia said it expects to ship “several billion dollars” worth of Blackwell revenue in the fiscal third quarter, which ends in October. Blackwell is the company’s latest generation of technology, following Hopper. There had been some concerns that Blackwell would be delayed, but CFO Colette Kress said on the call with analysts that “supply and availability have improved.”
Still, “demand for Blackwell platforms is well above supply, and we expect this to continue into next year,” Kress said.
Other than missing the “whisper” numbers, some investors may be looking at Nvidia’s gross margin, which slipped a bit in the quarter to 75.1% from 78.4% in the prior period. That’s up from 43.5% two years ago and 70.1% in the fiscal second quarter of last year.
For the full year, the company said it expects its gross margin to be in the “mid-70% range.” Analysts were expecting full-year margin of 76.4%, according to StreetAccount.
‘Getting returns right away’
On the earnings call, analysts asked Nvidia executives about customers and whether they’re making money on their investment. Following the company’s prior report, Kress gave investors data points showing that a cloud provider could make $5 over four years selling access to $1 of Nvidia chips.
This time, Nvidia took a different approach. CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday’s call that Nvidia’s technology will be taking work away from traditional processors, like those made by Intel or AMD. He also said generative AI would start to do more coding, that companies like Meta can use Nvidia chips for recommender systems, and that nations are starting to buy more chips.
“The people who are investing in Nvidia infrastructure are getting returns on it right away,” Huang said.
Huang also said that next-generation AI models would require “10, 20, 40 times” more computing power, echoing comments recently made by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The logo of Nvidia Corporation is seen during the annual Computex computer exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan.
Tyrone Siu | Reuters
“The frontier models are growing in quite substantial scale,” Huang said.
He said Nvidia’s main customers are vying to be first to produce new AI advancements.
“The first person to the next plateau gets to introduce a revolutionary level of AI,” Huang said. “The second person who gets there is incrementally better or about the same.”
But buying into Nvidia at these levels is a bet that the company can continue to outperform very high expectations and requires a willingness to accept the kind of stock volatility generally reserved for much smaller companies.
After reaching a record in June, Nvidia proceeded to lose almost 30% of its value over the next seven weeks, shedding roughly $800 billion in market cap. It’s since recovered most of those losses.
In the past two years, the stock has moved 5% or more in a single day on 50 separate occasions. For Microsoft, that’s happened only six times, which is one more than for Apple. At Meta, it’s happened 21 times. Tesla fans, however, can relate. Shares of the electric automaker have moved at least 5% on more than 70 trading days over that stretch.
One reason for Nvidia’s increased volatility is that it relies on a small group of customers — including those mentioned above — for an outsized amount of its revenue. Top execs at Alphabet and Meta both acknowledged recently that they could be overspending in their AI buildout, but said the risk of underinvesting was too great for them to not be aggressive.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
Read more CNBC politics coverage
X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
Read more CNBC tech news
“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.