After a quarter where Nvidia’s sales nearly doubled, investors and analysts are wondering how long the chipmaker can keep this kind of growth going now that it has a $140 billion annual revenue run rate.
Those hopes fall on Blackwell, which is Nvidia’s name for a family of server products based around its next-generation AI chip.
CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress gave investors several new data points on how Blackwell’s launch is shaping up on a call with analysts on Wednesday. The duo emphasized that the rollout is on track, and they signaled that Blackwell sales over the next few quarters will be limited by how many chips and systems Nvidia can make, not how much it can sell.
“Blackwell production is in full steam,” Huang said. “We will deliver this quarter more Blackwells than we had previously estimated.”
The company’s positive comments on Blackwell are one reason why the stock is only down 1%, despite the company missing elevated expectations from bullish investors who anticipated Nvidia would significantly exceed its own forecasts.
Huang and Kress’s comments also addressed fears about shipment delays that were spurred by reports that said Nvidia was making ongoing engineering changes to its systems to address problems.
Some of Nvidia’s most important end-customers have already received some Blackwell chips, the company confirmed on Wednesday. Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI have posted pictures of Blackwell-based server racks on their social media accounts, and on Wednesday, the company said 13,000 Blackwell chips have already been shipped to customers.
“There’s still a lot of a lot of engineering that happens at this point,” Huang said. “But as you see from all of the systems that are being stood up, Blackwell is in great shape.”
Those sample chips aren’t the bulk of the shipments that the company is expecting to make. They’re early versions intended to allow customers to start testing and get their systems and software ready for the volume shipments, which will start in Nvidia’s current quarter.
“We will we’ll ship more Blackwells next quarter than this [quarter], and we’ll ship more Blackwells the quarter after that than than our first quarter,” Huang said.
In July, Nvidia said it expected “several billion dollars” of Blackwell revenue in its current quarter, and on Wednesday, the company said it expects the amount of Blackwell sales for this quarter to be higher than its original forecast. Huang also said that Microsoft will soon start to preview its Blackwell-based systems to cloud customers.
A limiting factor to producing more Blackwell systems is the amount of components that Nvidia’s suppliers can provide, Huang said. Additionally, it takes time to ramp up the velocity of a manufacturing process that has gone from zero shipments to billions of dollars of shipments in a few months.
“It is the case that demand exceeds our supply, and that’s expected as we’re in the beginnings of this generative AI revolution,” Huang said.
“Almost every company in the world seems to be involved in our supply chain,” Huang said.
Nvidia said that Blackwell’s gross margins will be lower in the coming months than the 73.5% it reported in the third quarter, but the company said that margin will increase as the product matures. Huang pointed out that Blackwell comes as just the chip itself or in configurations that include an entire rack and other components.
Nvidia’s overall message on Wednesday was that its new Blackwell chip is in short supply because companies like OpenAI need the fastest GPUs available as quickly as possible to develop next-generation AI models. As Blackwell rolls out, Nvidia’s current AI chips, which it calls Hopper, will be relegated to serving AI models, not creating new ones. Nvidia said that Blackwell sales will eventually exceed those of Hopper.
“You see now that at the tail end of the last generation of foundation models, we’re at at about 100,000 Hoppers,” Huang said. “The next generation starts at 100,000 Blackwells.”
An icon of ASML is displayed on a smartphone, with an ASML chip visible in the background.
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ASML reported second-quarter earnings that beat estimates with the its key net bookings figure ahead of consensus.
However, the chip equipment giant missed analyst expectations for revenue guidance in the current quarter and warned of the possibility of no growth ahead.
Here’s how ASML did versus LSEG consensus estimates for the second quarter:
Net sales: 7.7 billion euros ($8.95 billion) versus 7.52 billion euros expected
Net profit: 2.29 billion euros vs 2.04 billion euros expected
In its own previous forecast issued in April, ASML had said it expected second-quarter net sales of between 7.2 billion euros and 7.7 billion euros. In a pre-recorded interview posted on ASML’s website, the company’s Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen said the beat was due to revenue from upgrading currently deployed machines as well as tariffs having a “less negative” impact than anticipated.
Analysts anticipated net bookings — a key indicator of order demand — would come in at 4.19 billion euros over the April-June stretch. ASML reported net bookings of 5.5 billion euros.
ASML is one of the most important semiconductor supply chain companies in the world. It makes extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, which are required to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world, such as those designed by Apple and Nvidia.
Like many companies in the semiconductor industry, ASML has been grappling with uncertainty created by U.S. tariff policy.
The company forecast third-quarter revenue of between 7.4 billion euros and 7.9 billion euros, which was shy of market expectations of 8.3 billion euros.
ASML said it expects full-year 2025 net sales to grow 15%, narrowing its guidance from a previously announced forecasts of between 30 billion euros to 35 billion euros.
However, the Dutch tech giant was less certain about the outlook for 2026.
“Looking at 2026, we see that our AI customers’ fundamentals remain strong,” ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said in a statement.
“At the same time, we continue to see increasing uncertainty driven by macro-economic and geopolitical developments. Therefore, while we still prepare for growth in 2026, we cannot confirm it at this stage.”
The Veldhoven, Netherlands-headquartered company has released its next generation EUV tools known as High NA, which stands for high numerical aperture. These machines, which are larger than a double-decker bus and can cost more than $400 million each, are key to ASML’s future growth plans.
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The logo for the Food and Drug Administration is seen ahead of a news conference on removing synthetic dyes from America’s food supply, at the Health and Human Services Headquarters in Washington, DC on April 22, 2025.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday published a warning letter addressed to the wrist wearable company Whoop, alleging it is marketing a new blood pressure feature without proper approvals.
The letter centers around Whoop’s Blood Pressure Insights (BPI) feature, which the company introduced alongside its latest hardware launch in May.
Whoop said its BPI feature uses blood pressure information to offer performance and wellness insights that inform consumers and improve athletic performance.
But the FDA said Tuesday that Whoop’s BPI feature is intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent disease — a key distinction that would reclassify the wellness tracker as a “medical device” that has to undergo a rigorous testing and approval processes.
“Providing blood pressure estimation is not a low-risk function,” the FDA said in the letter. “An erroneously low or high blood pressure reading can have significant consequences for the user.”
A Whoop spokesperson said the company’s system offers only a single daily estimated range and midpoint, which distinguishes it from medical blood pressure devices used for diagnosis or management of high blood pressure.
Whoop users who purchase the $359 “Whoop Life” subscription tier can use the BPI feature to get daily insights about their blood pressure, including estimated systolic and diastolic ranges, according to the company.
Whoop also requires users to log three traditional cuff-readings to act as a baseline in order to unlock the BPI feature.
Additionally, the spokesperson said the BPI data is not unlike other wellness metrics that the company deals with. Just as heart rate variability and respiratory rate can have medical uses, the spokesperson said, they are permitted in a wellness context too.
“We believe the agency is overstepping its authority in this case by attempting to regulate a non-medical wellness feature as a medical device,” the Whoop spokesperson said.
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High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is the number one risk factor for heart attacks, strokes and other types of cardiovascular disease, according to Dr. Ian Kronish, an internist and co-director of Columbia University’s Hypertension Center.
Kronish told CNBC that wearables like Whoop are a big emerging topic of conversation among hypertension experts, in part because there’s “concern that these devices are not yet proven to be accurate.”
If patients don’t get accurate blood pressure readings, they can’t make informed decisions about the care they need.
At the same time, Kronish said wearables like Whoop present a “big opportunity” for patients to take more control over their health, and that many professionals are excited to work with these tools.
Understandably, it can be confusing for consumers to navigate. Kronish encouraged patients to talk with their doctor about how they should use wearables like Whoop.
“It’s really great to hear that the FDA is getting more involved around informing consumers,” Kronish said.
FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seen in Silver Spring, Maryland November 4, 2009.
Jason Reed | Reuters
Whoop is not the only wearable manufacturer that’s exploring blood pressure monitoring.
Omron and Garmin both offer medical blood pressure monitoring with on-demand readings that fall under FDA regulation. Samsung also offers blood-pressure-reading technology, but it is not available in the U.S. market.
Apple has also been teasing a blood pressure sensor for its watches, but has not been able to deliver. In 2024, the tech giant received FDA approval for its sleep apnea detection feature.
Whoop has previously received FDA clearance for its ECG feature, which is used to record and analyze a heart’s electrical activity to detect potential irregularities in rhythm. But when it comes to blood pressure, Whoop believes the FDA’s perspective is antiquated.
“We do not believe blood pressure should be considered any more or less sensitive than other physiological metrics like heart rate and respiratory rate,” a spokesperson said. “It appears that the FDA’s concerns may stem from outdated assumptions about blood pressure being strictly a clinical domain and inherently associated with a medical diagnosis.”
The FDA said Whoop could be subject to regulatory actions like seizure, injunction, and civil money penalties if it fails to address the violations that the agency identified in its letter.
Whoop has 15 business days to respond with steps the company has taken to address the violations, as well as how it will prevent similar issues from happening again.
“Even accounting for BPI’s disclaimers, they do not change this conclusion, because they are insufficient to outweigh the fact that the product is, by design, intended to provide a blood pressure estimation that is inherently associated with the diagnosis of a disease or condition,” the FDA said.
United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the first two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation stands ready for launch on pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on October 5, 2023 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States.
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As Amazon chases SpaceX in the internet satellite market, the e-commerce and computing giant is now counting on Elon Musk’s rival company to get its next batch of devices into space.
On Wednesday, weather permitting, 24 Kuiper satellites will hitch a ride on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets from a launchpad on Florida’s Space Coast. A 27-minute launch window for the mission, dubbed “KF-01,” opens at 2:18 a.m. ET.
The launch will be livestreamed on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk.
The mission marks an unusual alliance. SpaceX’s Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide.
Amazon launched Project Kuiper in 2019 with an aim to provide broadband internet from a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company is working under a tight deadline imposed by the Federal Communications Commission that requires it to have about 1,600 satellites in orbit by the end of July 2026.
Amazon’s first two Kuiper launches came in April and June, sending 27 satellites each time aboard rockets supplied by United Launch Alliance.
Assuming Wednesday’s launch is a success, Amazon will have a total of 78 satellites in orbit. In order to meet the FCC’s tight deadline, Amazon needs to rapidly manufacture and deploy satellites, securing a hefty amount of capacity from rocket providers. Kuiper has booked up to 83 launches, including three rides with SpaceX.
Space has emerged as a battleground between Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, two of the world’s richest men. Aside from Kuiper, Bezos also competes with Musk via his rocket company Blue Origin.
Blue Origin in January sent up its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time, which is intended to rival SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets. While Blue Origin currently trails SpaceX, Bezos last year predicted his latest venture will one day be bigger than Amazon, which he started in 1994.
Kuiper has become one of Amazon’s biggest bets, with more than $10 billion earmarked for the project. The company may need to spend as much as $23 billion to build its full constellation, analysts at Bank of America wrote in a note to clients last week. That figure doesn’t include the cost of building terminals, which consumers will use to connect to the service.
The analysts estimate Amazon is spending $150 million per launch this year, while satellite production costs are projected to total $1.1 billion by the fourth quarter.
Amazon is going after a market that’s expected to grow to at least $40 billion by 2030, the analysts wrote, citing estimates by Boston Consulting Group. The firm estimated that Amazon could generate $7.1 billion in sales from Kuiper by 2032 if it claims 30% of the market.
“With Starlink’s solid early growth, our estimates could be conservative,” the analysts wrote.