NVIDIA has once again delivered a strong earnings report, beating expectations on both revenue and profit while guiding well above Wall Street forecasts.
Despite this, the muted share price reaction highlights how elevated investors’ expectations have become. Meanwhile, concerns about how AI is changing society continue to grow, especially among the youngest generation entering an evolving labor market, writes eToro analyst for Romania, Bogdan Maioreanu
The central player in AI infrastructure which provided chips to leading AI model had revenue of USD 81.6 billion, up 85% year-on-year, driven primarily by the data center segment, which generated USD 75.2 billion, up 92%. For a company of this scale, such growth remains remarkable. Guidance for the next quarter came in at around USD 91 billion, ahead of the roughly USD 87 billion consensus, while NVIDIA also raised its quarterly dividend to 25 cents and authorized an additional USD 80 billion in buybacks. This signals a clear intent to maintain shareholder support as outsized capital gains become harder to sustain. The company also highlighted that AI demand is now permeating edge and enterprise environments, not just hyperscale data centers, underlining how pervasive this cycle has become.
Again, Nvidia did not include any China data center compute revenue in its outlook, despite US government approval for H200 chip exports to China. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the company has “largely conceded” China’s advanced AI chip market to Huawei, as U.S. export controls have effectively pushed NVIDIA out and accelerated China’s drive for semiconductor self-sufficiency. He noted that demand in China remains huge and mentioned Huawei’s strength and record performance, saying NVIDIA has effectively handed the market over as local chip ecosystems flourished in its absence. China previously accounted for at least 20% of NVIDIA’s data center revenue.
NVIDIA’s growth story is currently expanding beyond GPUs. Networking revenue reached USD 14.8 billion, exceeding expectations and underscoring the growing importance of infrastructure as AI factories are built out at scale. At the same time, the company is positioning itself in CPUs, leveraging its Vera Rubin platform to capture the next wave of agentic AI workloads, the emerging layer of the AI cycle. While NVIDIA remains central to the AI trade, competitors like Intel and AMD lead the way on CPUs for now, with both stocks more than doubling this year as investors price in a broader distribution of value across the compute stack. The results reinforce that AI is a multi-year structural trend, but also suggest that future gains will be shared across a wider set of players.
AI growth is met with increased resistance from society
While hyperscalers and companies are trying to push AI on a wide scale, the changes it brings to society are met with increased resistance by the youngest generation fresh out of universities and colleges. AI mentions were booed at graduation speeches held by some business leaders, including the ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and the Gen Z generation is increasingly more vocal about the potential dangers AI might bring to society.
A recent Gallup poll revealed that Generation Z – people born between 1997 and 2012 – is not convinced that AI enhances creativity or critical thinking. Gallup finds that Gen Z’s adoption of AI tools has plateaued at a relatively high level, with about half of young Americans using AI at least weekly. However, sentiment has cooled markedly over the past year: excitement and hopefulness about AI have declined, while worry, frustration and even anger have risen, especially around concerns that AI could hurt learning, job prospects and broader society. This leaves a generation that frequently uses AI but feels increasingly skeptical about its benefits. Gen Z workers place more trust in work completed without AI (69%) than in AI-assisted work (28%). A new report by the AI company Writer and research firm Workplace Intelligent found that 44% of polled Gen Z workers across the US, UK, and Europe said they’re “sabotaging their company’s AI strategy in at least one way,” from entering proprietary company information into chatbots to refusing to use AI tools outright.
NVIDIA’s latest results underline just how deeply AI has become embedded in the global economy, from hyperscale data centers to the emerging edge and enterprise deployments that will define the next leg of this boom. It also highlights the level of perfection the market expects from AI companies. Yet the growing dissonance between Wall Street’s enthusiasm and Gen Z’s unease is becoming too loud to ignore. The tension between record AI profits and rising grassroots skepticism about expanding data centers guzzling electricity and AI impact on the labor market and society in general, suggests the next phase of this story might not be written in silicon alone. It may also depend on how convincingly companies can show that AI’s gains are shared across society, and how its downsides are addressed. Meanwhile, AI remains a favorite investment theme on trading and investing platform eToro, with Nvidia being the number one most held stock, while all the Magnificent 7 stocks are also in the top 10 at the end of the first quarter of this year.
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