Nvidia CEO Ducks Key Questions

For all the Nvidia watchers out there, including superfans of the stock who have kept track at bars, we’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Nvidia delivered another set of monster earnings. It reported top-line growth of 122%—a little above its own projections—lifting net income 168% to $16.6 billion. 

The bad news is that we learned nothing to answer the trillion-dollar question of whether the money big tech companies and their customers are pouring into artificial intelligence is yielding a decent return for any of them. The worry on Wall Street is that if no one but Nvidia gets a return on AI, the bottom will eventually fall out of the AI market. That would be bad for Nvidia but also not great for big tech companies spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP on capital expenditures right now to build new AI-powered data centers.