Nvidia sales were up 94 percent to $35 billion in the most recent quarter when profits more than doubled, to $19.3 billion, telegraphing the strength of the artificial intelligence boom that took the company from the top supplier of graphics boards for gaming PCs to the world’s most valuable public company with a market cap of $3.59 trillion. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told analysts that demand for the company’s latest AI chip, Blackwell, has been “incredible,” driving projections of $3.59 trillion in revenue for the current quarter as customers begin to take shipments.

Google, Meta Platforms and xAI are lining up to take delivery on the Blackwell chips to power their data centers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which says that while Nvidia exceeded some forecasts, other analysts were disappointed “following several quarters of sky-high revenue and profits.”

Delivery of the Blackwell chip was reportedly delayed, due to manufacturing difficulties. But Huang said in a statement accompanying the third quarter fiscal 2025 earnings report that demand for the company’s current Hopper chip “and anticipation for Blackwell — in full production — are incredible as foundation model makers scale pretraining, post-training and inference.”

CNBC quotes Nvidia CFO Colette Kress telling analysts that 13,000 Blackwell samples “have been shipped to customers,” each one of them “racing to be the first to market.” CNBC names Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle as among those taking delivery. Meta Platforms is likely in that group, too.

WSJ points out that “Nvidia’s market capitalization has increased by $2.36 trillion in 2024 through Wednesday’s close, greater than the entire current value of Google parent Alphabet.” Still, some investors are skittish that such momentum cannot continue.

While “companies are continuing to pour billions of dollars into generative AI technology” in general and Nvidia’s chips in particular, which “are being purchased to power chatbots, write software code and discover new drugs. Those efforts have continued, even as some skeptics on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley question whether the financial return on those applications will justify their staggering costs,” reports The New York Times.

According to NYT, Huang “has traveled in recent weeks to India, Japan and Indonesia to encourage the countries and their companies to invest in building data centers.”