Nvidia fails to hit lofty goals after shares fall

Nvidia's stock has nearly quadrupled so far this year, and is up more than nine-fold over the last two years. File Picture: Jeff Chiu/AP

Nvidia forecast fourth-quarter revenue slightly above estimates yesterday, but still failed to meet lofty expectations of some investors who have made it the world’s most valuable firm.

Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based company fell roughly 2% in extended trading. They had closed down 0.8% during the regular trading session.

The company forecast revenue of $37.5bn, plus or minus 2%, for the fourth quarter, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $37.09bn, according to data compiled by LSEG.

“The age of AI is in full steam, propelling a global shift to NVIDIA computing,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “Demand for Hopper and anticipation for Blackwell — in full production — are incredible as foundation model makers scale pretraining, post-training, and inference,” he said, referring to two high-performing AI chips.

Expectations ran high ahead of the results, with Nvidia shares up more than 20% over the last two months. The stock has nearly quadrupled so far this year, and is up more than nine-fold over the last two years.

“Investors have become accustomed to huge beats from this company, but doing that is getting harder and harder,” said Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group. “This was still a very solid report, but the truth is that, when the bar is this high, it makes things just that much tougher.”

Supply chain snags

While demand is soaring for the company’s chips that make up the brains of complex generative AI systems, supply chain snags have made it harder for Nvidia to report the big beats on revenue that have helped make it a Wall Street darling.

One of the bottlenecks for its chip supply has been the limited capacity for advanced manufacturing techniques at the company’s manufacturing partner TSMC Ltd (2330.TW).

The company recorded third-quarter adjusted earnings of 81 cents per share, compared with estimates of 75 cents per share.

Sales in the data centre segment, which accounts for a majority of Nvidia’s revenue, grew 112% to $30.77bn in the quarter ended October 27. The segment had recorded growth of 154% in the prior quarter.

Nvidia’s sales are boosted by cloud companies’ continued spending on its chips, as they expand data centres capable of handling generative AI’s complex processing needs.

The company said it had fixed a design flaw with its Blackwell chips by changing the blueprints used by TSMC to manufacture it.

• Reuters