Nvidia’s Huang touts ‘full steam’ AI spend while China uncertainty remains
Nvidia stock fluctuated on Thursday as investors digested the company’s latest earnings report, which signaled robust AI demand but provided little clarity on China.
Sales surged 56% in the quarter to $46.74 billion, which was roughly in line Wall Street’s projected $46.06 billion, according to LSEG. The company reported adjusted earnings per share of $1.05, just topping the $1.01 per share estimated by analysts.
The better-than-expected results were clouded by concerns over Nvidia’s future in China.
“There was more noise around this quarter and the guidance and what’s implied than I can remember ever on an Nvidia quarter, let alone on any other megacap tech company,” said Deepwater Management’s Gene Munster. “Of course, a lot of that noise is related to all the mechanics around China.”
In April, the Trump administration blocked Nvidia from selling its H20 chip in the market.
In August, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang struck a deal with President Donald Trump to restart sales to China by agreeing to give 15% of sales in the region to the government. That deal has not been finalized.
The market could be a $50 billion opportunity for Nvidia, growing 50% per year, Huang said in a call with analysts Wednesday, while adding that there’s a “real possibility” Nvidia can sell its advanced Blackwell processor there.
But the fate of its H20 chip, which was made specifically for China, remains up in the air.
Management said that Nvidia could ship between $2 billion and $5 billion in H20 revenue during the third quarter if the geopolitical environment permits.
Nvidia said it expects revenue this quarter to be $54 billion, plus or minus 2%, though that number doesn’t include any H20 shipments to China. Analysts were expecting revenue of $53.1 billion, according to LSEG.
Data center revenue of $41.1 billion in Q2 came up short of estimates for the second straight period, but still grew 56% over the year prior. The segment was up 5% over Q1, slowing from the prior quarter when data center revenue grew 10%.
For Nvidia bulls, there was still plenty of reason for optimism.
On a post-earnings conference call with investors, Huang said AI has made “tremendous progress” in the last year and that the build-out of AI infrastructure is still in its early stages.
“As the AI revolution went into full steam, as the AI race is now on, the capex spend has doubled to $600 billion per year,” he said. “There’s five years between now and the end of the decade, and $600 billion only represents the top four hyperscalers.”
Huang projected $3 trillion to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure spend by the end of the decade.
“The opportunity ahead is immense,” he added.
Benchmark analysts said in a Thursday note that Nvidia’s guidance was “only modest upside to an elevated Street consensus,” but overall the report showed “solid sequential and annual growth.”
“We believe Nvidia’s results are consistent with its previous objectives and are in no way indicative of a slowdown in industry-wide AI interest or investments,” the analysts, who have a buy rating on Nvidia’s stock, wrote in a note to clients.
The results showed that the “playbook remains the same” for Nvidia, JPMorgan analysts wrote.
“A solid beat and raise with multiple levers at play to drive upside, against the backdrop of a multi-year runway of growth for AI infrastructure spending, with NVDA in our view continuing to capture a significant majority of incremental spend (as it has over the past ~3 years),” the analysts said.
Nvidia 1-day stock chart.
Charges against Jeffrey Epstein were announced on July 8, 2019 in New York City. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors.
Stephanie Keith | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon are among those who appeared in partially redacted files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that were released on Friday by Democrats in the House Oversight Committee.
The committee earlier embarked on a probe to evaluate whether the federal government mishandled its case against Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence following a 2022 conviction for recruiting teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
President Donald Trump had promised voters on the campaign trail that he would release government documents related to Epstein, who was arrested in the summer of 2019 on sex trafficking charges and died in a New York federal prison, reportedly by suicide, before trial.
However, Trump has refused to endorse the release of any Epstein files since returning to the White House in January, and Republicans in Congress have followed his lead, keeping the documents out of the public’s view.
Democrats in the committee on Friday released redacted pages from a new batch of files they obtained through their probe without giving their Republican peers advanced notice. They were rebuked for the move.
In a statement on Friday, the committee said that the batch included 8,544 documents in response to a subpoena in August, and that, “Further review of the documents, which were redacted to protect the identity of victims, is ongoing.”
The latest batch of documents received by the committee from the Justice Department contained itineraries and notes by Epstein memorializing invitations he’d sent, trips he’d planned and meetings he’d booked with tech and business leaders.
Demonstrators gather for a press conference calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files outside the United States Captiol on Wednesday September 03, 2025 in Washington, DC.
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
One of the itineraries indicated that Epstein expected Musk to make a trip to his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Dec. 6, 2014, but then asked “is this still happening?”
Musk told Vanity Fair in 2019 that he had visited Epstein’s New York City mansion and that Epstein “tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island,” but the Tesla CEO had declined.
In June, Musk wrote in a post on X, that he thought Trump and his administration were withholding Epstein-related files from the public view in order to protect the president’s reputation.
“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” Musk, who was in the midst of a public spat with the president, wrote at the time. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
Trump was mentioned in previously released court documents from the Epstein case, but has not been formally accused of wrongdoing.
Musk started the year leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort to slash the size of the federal government and reduce the power of various regulatory agencies. He left DOGE in May, and he and the president proceeded to hurl insults at each other in public over a number of disagreements.
However, Trump and Musk remain close enough that they sat together at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk earlier this month after the right-wing activist was assassinated while speaking at a university in Utah.
The partially redacted files also indicated Epstein had breakfast with Bannon on Feb. 16, 2019, and lunch with investor Peter Thiel on Nov. 27, 2017. Bannon is a long-time Trump ally, and Thiel was a major backer of Trump ahead of the 2016 election who spoke at the Republican National Convention.
The files also mentioned that Epstein booked a “tentative breakfast party” with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, historically a supporter of Democrats, in December 2014.
Musk, Thiel, Bannon and Gates weren’t immediately available for comment.
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