Nvidia is on a tear, and it doesn’t seem to have an expiration date.
Nvidia makes the graphics processors, or GPUs, that are needed to build AI applications like ChatGPT. In particular, there’s extreme demand for its highest-end AI chip, the H100, among tech companies right now.
Nvidia’s overall sales grew 171% on an annual basis to $13.51 billion in its second fiscal quarter, which ended July 30, the company announced Wednesday. Not only is it selling a bunch of AI chips, but they’re more profitable, too: The company’s gross margin expanded over 25 percentage points versus the same quarter last year to 71.2% — incredible for a physical product.
Plus, Nvidia said that it sees demand remaining high through next year and said it has secured increase supply, enabling it to increase the number of chips it has on hand to sell in the coming months.
The company’s stock rose more than 6% after hours on the news, adding to its remarkable gain of more than 200% this year so far.
It’s clear from Wednesday’s report that Nvidia is profiting more from the AI boom than any other company.
Nvidia reported an incredible $6.7 billion in net income in the quarter, a 422% increase over the same time last year.
“I think I was high on the Street for next year coming into this report but my numbers have to go way up,” wrote Chaim Siegel, an analyst at Elazar Advisors, in a note after the report. He lifted his price target to $1,600, a “3x move from here,” and said, “I still think my numbers are too conservative.”
He said that price suggests a multiple of 13 times 2024 earnings per share.
Nvidia’s prodigious cashflow contrasts with its top customers, which are spending heavily on AI hardware and building multi-million dollar AI models, but haven’t yet started to see income from the technology.
About half of Nvidia’s data center revenue comes from cloud providers, followed by big internet companies. The growth in Nvidia’s data center business was in “compute,” or AI chips, which grew 195% during the quarter, more than the overall business’s growth of 171%.
Microsoft, which has been a huge customer of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, both for its Azure cloud and its partnership with OpenAI, has been increasing its capital expenditures to build out its AI servers, and doesn’t expect a positive “revenue signal” until next year.
On the consumer internet front, Meta said it expects to spend as much as $30 billion this year on data centers, and possibly more next year as it works on AI. Nvidia said on Wednesday that Meta was seeing returns in the form of increased engagement.
Some startups have even gone into debt to buy Nvidia GPUs in hopes of renting them out for a profit in the coming months.
On an earnings call with analysts, Nvidia officials gave some perspective about why its data center chips are so profitable.
Nvidia said its software contributes to its margin and that it is selling more complicated products than mere silicon. Nvidia’s AI software, called Cuda, is cited by analysts as the primary reason why customers can’t easily switch to competitors like AMD.
“Our Data Center products include a significant amount of software and complexity which is also helping for gross margins,” Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress said on a call with analysts.
Nvidia is also compiling its technology into expensive and complicated systems like its HGX box, which combines eight H100 GPUs into a single computer. Nvidia boasted on Wednesday that building one of these boxes uses a supply chain of 35,000 parts. HGX boxes can cost around $299,999, according to reports, versus a volume price of between $25,000 and $30,000 for a single H100, according to a recent Raymond James estimate.
Nvidia said that as it ships its coveted H100 GPU out to cloud service providers, they are often opting for the more complete system.
“We call it H100, as if it’s a chip that comes off of a fab, but H100s go out, really, as HGX to the world’s hyperscalers and they’re really quite large system components,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on a call with analysts.
Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain, and Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, attend the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Nvidia will sell over 18,000 of its latest artificial intelligence chips to Saudi Arabian company Humain, CEO Jensen Huang announced on Tuesday.
The announcement was made as part of a White House-led trip to the region that includes President Donald Trump and other top CEOs.
The cutting-edge Blackwell chips will be used in a 500 megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia, according to remarks at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh on Tuesday. Nvidia said its first deployment will use its GB300 Blackwell chips, which are among Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips at the moment, and which were only officially announced earlier this year.
Tuesday’s announcement underscores the importance of Nvidia’s chips as a bargaining tool for the Trump administration as countries around the world clamor for the devices, which are used to train and deploy advanced AI software such as ChatGPT.
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“I am so delighted to be here to help celebrate the grand opening, the beginning of Humain,” Huang said. “It is an incredible vision, indeed, that Saudi Arabia should build the AI infrastructure of your nation so that you could participate and help shape the future of this incredibly transformative technology.”
Nvidia shares rose 4% in trading on Tuesday.
Last week, the Department of Commerce said that it was going to scrap what it called President Joe Biden’s rule, and implement a “much simpler rule.” Nvidia has also been required to seek an export license for its AI chips since 2023 because of national security concerns.
Humain will be owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and will work on developing AI models as well as building data center infrastructure, according to a press release. Humain’s plans eventually include deploying “several hundred thousand” Nvidia GPUs.
“Saudi Arabia is rich with energy, transforming the energy through this giant versions of these Nvidia AI supercomputers, which are essentially AI factories,” Huang said.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella leaves after attending a meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 30, 2024.
Willy Kurniawan | Reuters
Microsoft on Tuesday said that it’s laying off 3% of employees across all levels, teams and geographies.
“We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April.
Microsoft had 228,000 employees worldwide at the end of June, meaning that the move will affect thousands of employees.
It’s likely Microsoft’s largest round of layoffs since the elimination of 10,000 roles in 2023. In January the company announced a small round of layoffs that were performance-based. These new job cuts are not related to performance, the spokesperson said.
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One objective is to reduce layers of management, the spokesperson said.
Last week cybersecurity software provider CrowdStrike announced it would lay off 5% of its workforce.
In January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts that the company would make sales execution changes that led to lower growth than expected in Azure cloud revenue that wasn’t tied to artificial intelligence. Performance in AI cloud growth outdid internal projections.
“How do you really tweak the incentives, go-to-market?” Nadella said. “At a time of platform shifts, you kind of want to make sure you lean into even the new design wins, and you just don’t keep doing the stuff that you did in the previous generation.”
On Monday, Microsoft shares stopped trading at $449.26, the highest price so far this year. They closed at a record $467.56 last July.
Hinge Health co-founders Gabriel Mecklenburg (left) and Daniel Perez (right).
Courtesy of Hinge Health
Hinge Health said in a filing on Tuesday that it plans to raise up to $437 million in its upcoming initial public offering.
The digital physical therapy startup filed its initial prospectus in March, and it updated the document with an expected pricing range for its Class A common stock of $28 to $32 per share. Hinge said it plans to sell about 13.7 million shares in the offering.
Based on the number of Class A and Class B shares outstanding after the offering, the deal would value the company at $2.42 billion in the middle of the range, though that number could be higher on a fully diluted basis.
Hinge, founded in 2014, uses software to help patients treat acute musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company was co-founded by CEO Daniel Perez and Executive Chairman Gabriel Mecklenburg, who have both experienced personal struggles with physical rehabilitation.
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Three weeks after Hinge filed its initial prospectus, President Donald Trump announced a sweeping tariff policy that plunged U.S. markets into turmoil. That volatility has caused several companies, including online lender Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub, to delay their long-awaited IPOs.
Hinge is forging ahead anyway, and a second digital health startup, virtual chronic care company Omada Health, filed to go public on Friday. Both IPOs will be closely watched by the digital health sector, which has been mostly devoid of public offerings since 2021.
During its first quarter, Hinge said that revenue climbed 50% to $123.8 million, up from $82.7 million during the same period last year. Hinge reported $117.3 million in revenue during its fourth quarter, up 44% from the same period in 2023.
The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Hinge has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021, the last time the company raised outside funding. The biggest institutional shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to its prospectus.