When Nvidia lost $600 billion in market value in a single day last month, it was because some investors feared for the future of the artificial intelligence chipmaker. DeepSeek, a Chinese start-up, said it had made its A.I. systems with a small fraction of the A.I. chips used by other companies, and at a small fraction of the cost.
On Wednesday, Nvidia showed those fears were overblown, even as the breakneck pace of its growth slows. The company, a bellwether for A.I., said purchases of its A.I. chips lifted its total revenue by 78 percent from a year earlier to $39.33 billion during the three months that ended in January. Profit rose 80 percent to $22.09 billion.
In previous quarters, Nvidia reported that sales and profits had more than doubled. But continuing to deliver those kinds of gains has become more difficult as its sales and profits rise. (For a business like Nvidia, it is common for the growth rate to slow after a period of phenomenal increases, a phenomenon known as the law of large numbers.)
Nvidia’s quarterly results exceeded Wall Street analysts’ expectations for $38.32 billion in sales and $21.08 billion in profit. The company projected that revenue in the current quarter would rise 65 percent from a year ago to $43 billion, a slowdown from the previous quarter but about $1 billion more than Wall Street had predicted.
Shares in Nvidia were almost flat in after-hours trading, following the company’s 3.7 percent gain on Wednesday. It remains the world’s second-most-valuable publicly traded company, behind Apple.
Nvidia’s business has been buoyed by the biggest tech companies’ nonstop spending on A.I. data centers. After pouring tens of billions of dollars into new infrastructure last year, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have said they will each spend $65 billion to $100 billion or more this year.
Much of that money will flow straight to Nvidia. The company, by some estimates, controls 90 percent of the market for the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that power A.I. systems. It is rolling out a new, more powerful series of A.I. chips known as Blackwell and charges $60,000 to $70,000 for a signature chip.
How long the build-out of data centers will last has been a question since the start of the A.I. boom. DeepSeek challenged a tech industry consensus that to build bigger and better A.I. systems, companies would have to build bigger and more powerful data centers. It set off fears that companies might pull back on their spending with Nvidia.
Since then, a new consensus has emerged that Nvidia will continue to benefit because it will become affordable for more companies to develop A.I. systems. An expanded field of A.I. businesses would create more customers for Nvidia’s expensive chips, not fewer, as initially feared.
Nvidia said data center revenue, which includes the sale of chips, cables and high-performance computing, rose 93 percent to $35.58 billion in the quarter from a year earlier.
“Nobody is backing off their commitment to build A.I. data centers and the power to generate more electricity for those data centers,” said Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management, a financial firm that tracks Nvidia. “Everyone is still competing.”
Though Nvidia has rebounded since late January, concerns about data center spending continue to whiplash the stock. Shares fell nearly 6 percent early this week after Wall Street analysts reported that Microsoft had canceled some data center contracts. Microsoft didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said “We’ve successfully ramped up the massive-scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers, achieving billions of dollars in sales in its first quarter. A.I. is advancing at light speed.”
Nvidia continues to face geopolitical challenges, as well. The Biden administration curbed the sale of its chips to China and introduced a rule to cap the sales of its A.I. chips to more than 100 countries. Howard Lutnick, the Trump administration’s commerce secretary, told Congress during his confirmation hearing that tech companies, including Nvidia, “need to stop helping” China.
Since the U.S. government began restricting chip exports, Nvidia’s sales in China have fallen to less than 14 percent of revenue from 19 percent in the fiscal year 2023.
Late last month, Mr. Huang visited the White House to discuss A.I. and semiconductors with President Trump. Mr. Trump told reporters afterward that he couldn’t say whether he would ban more of Nvidia’s chip sales to China.
