Nvidia has had another impressive quarter. Record revenue of $30 billion in Q2 was up 122 percent from a year ago, while data center revenue of $26.3 billion marked a 154 percent increase from the same period in 2023. The performance was seen by many as an assurance of AI’s staying power, although others raised concern that if the AI companies buying chips do not start generating profits soon, the sugar high of the two-year AI boom could precede a crash. Nvidia took the occasion to tout its next-generation Blackwell chips, reassuring investors that a mid-production “tweak” would not delay release.

“The overall results, while still robust, highlighted challenges from the increased complexity of Nvidia’s newest products, and showed its growth slowing from the supercharged clip over the past year,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

The “AI frenzy may have finally peaked, making ever rising profitability unrealistic,” Bloomberg ruminates, noting that while the profitability growth was marginally lower this quarter, Nvidia “still keeps more than 50 percent of sales as profit, five times the average margin for the S&P 500.”

Nvidia’s profit for fiscal Q2 2025 was nearly $16.6 billion against sales (revenue) of $30 billion. That’s a profit increase of 168 percent year-over-year and +12 percent gain over Q1, according to the company’s earnings release.

The New York Times refers to Nvidia’s financials as “a bellwether for AI spending” that “blew past Wall Street’s expectations for another quarter.”

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang pointed “to new opportunities that generative AI is providing for large companies and startups,” largely made possible by Nvidia products. Nvidia claims its Blackwell GPU delivered “up to 4x more performance on Llama 2 70B” while its Hopper architecture also showed “large gains across industry AI benchmarks.”

Simultaneous with its earnings announcement, the company launched NIM Agent Blueprints to help enterprise developers build and deploy customized generative AI applications.

At the time of Wednesday’s earnings announcement, Nvidia had added 150 percent to its stock price this year, boosting its valuation above $3 trillion, “making it the second-largest listed company in the world, behind Apple,” according to WSJ.

Related:
Nvidia’s Future Relies on Chips That Push Technology’s Limits, The Wall Street Journal, 8/30/24