NVIDIA shares rise in after-hours trading

NVIDIA started the week at US$937.70 and climbed to the US$945 to US$950 range ahead of its results, which came out just after the market closed on Wednesday; NVIDIA’s share price was sitting at US$949.50 at that time.

Following the announcement, NVIDIA rose 4.76 percent in after-hours trading to hit US$992.57, then dipped to US$967.01 less than five minutes later. At the time of this writing, NVIDIA’s share price was on an upward trend towards US$1,000, a figure that analysts expect the company will reach this year.

Contextualizing NVIDIA’s performance

NVIDIA’s share price is up 95.65 percent year-to-date, and its advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have made it one of the most sought-after stocks, drawing attention from investors and industry experts alike.

According to Pete Evans of BNN Bloomberg, this earnings season marks one year since NVIDIA’s share price increased by an astounding 25 percent in a single day after the results for its first fiscal quarter of 2024 blew analysts’ expectations away. The rapid growth was driven by what founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the time called “unprecedented demand” for NVIDIA’s AI products, which have since been a key driver of a tech boom not seen since the early 2000s.

FactSet, a leading provider of financial data and analytics, has identified NVIDIA as the largest contributor to year-on-year earnings growth for the information technology sector and the entire S&P 500 (INDEXSP:.INX). The company’s results for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2024, released in February, revealed impressive revenue and earnings growth, which led to another surge in NVIDIA’s share price and eventually brought the company ahead of Aramco (TADAWUL:2222) to become the third most valuable company, behind Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), in March.

NVIDIA’s keynote presentation in March, where the company unveiled its latest AI technology developments, further fueled investor confidence and contributed to the stock’s upward momentum.

Huang says next industrial revolution has begun

In Wednesday’s release, Huang highlights the company’s data center growth, which he said has been fueled by accelerating demand for generative AI training and inference on the company’s Hopper platform. This demand has expanded beyond cloud service providers to include consumer internet companies, enterprises, sovereign AI as well as automotive and healthcare customers, creating multiple multibillion-dollar vertical markets.

NVIDIA’s next wave of growth will be driven by the Blackwell platform, as well as NVIDIA NIM, a software solution that delivers enterprise-grade generative AI across a network of ecosystem partners to on-premise data centers and RTX AI PCs. Huang also said that Spectrum-X, a solution that improves the performance and efficiency of AI clouds by leveraging advanced ethernet technology, will open up a new market segment for NVIDIA.

“The next industrial revolution has begun — companies and countries are partnering with NVIDIA to shift the trillion-dollar traditional data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center — AI factories — to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence,” he said. “AI will bring significant productivity gains to nearly every industry and help companies be more cost- and energy-efficient while expanding revenue opportunities.

Along with its quarterly results, the company announced a 10 for one stock split that will go into effect on June 7. Holders of NVIDIA common stock will each receive nine additional shares at the close of the market on June 7, and trading will commence on a split-adjusted basis on June 10.

For its second fiscal quarter of 2025, NVIDIA is projecting revenue of roughly US$28 billion.