WHAT JUST HAPPENED? If the AI boom really is a bubble that will one day pop, it hasn't happened yet. Nvidia, the driving force behind the hardware powering most of the AI industry, once again surpassed Wall Street expectations in its quarterly results, hitting a record $81.6 billion in revenue.
Americans might rather live next to a nuclear power plant than a data center, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hailed the pace at which these facilities are being built. "The buildout of AI factories – the largest infrastructure expansion in human history – is accelerating at extraordinary speed," he said.
Huang also mentioned another controversial element of AI, one which has contributed to layoffs at companies like Meta and Block. "Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value, and scaling rapidly across companies and industries."
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress summed up the situation this way: "Customers do not buy GPUs; they build AI factories & the right economic metric is not the purchase price of the GPU. It is the lifetime cost of an AI factory producing intelligence: tokens per watt, tokens per dollar, uptime, utilization, time to production, software durability & asset life. NVIDIA excels at all of them."
