Computers Nvidia defies skepticism after Deepseek shock
The AI boom has seen the chip company Nvidia's business continue to grow rapidly. Nvidia exceeded analysts' expectations with both its turnover in the past quarter and its forecast for the current quarter.
26.02.2025, 23:18
27.02.2025, 04:25
SDA
In the past quarter, Nvidia's turnover shot up by 78 percent year-on-year to 39.3 billion dollars. The business with technology for data centers grew even faster with an increase of 93 percent to 35.6 billion dollars. "Blackwell" brought in eleven billion dollars of this. At the bottom line, profit rose from 12.3 to 22.1 billion dollars.
Nvidia is currently in the process of launching a more powerful new generation of its AI chips called "Blackwell". Technical problems had delayed the launch by several months, but have now been resolved, said CEO Jensen Huang on CNBC. The demand for "Blackwell" is "extraordinary", he assured. He had a better feeling about the chip system, which weighs one and a half tons and consists of more than one million parts, than three months previously.
Nvidia's chip systems are used around the world for training applications with artificial intelligence (AI). Heavyweights such as Google or the Facebook group Meta fill entire data centers with them - but AI start-ups such as the ChatGPT inventor company OpenAI also rely on them. This key position is allowing Nvidia's business to continue to grow.
DeepSeek is "fantastic"
In recent weeks, some have questioned whether as many Nvidia chips are really needed to train artificial intelligence as previously assumed. This was triggered by the Chinese AI Deepseek, which was allegedly trained with very little effort.
Huang even said that Deepseek was "fantastic" for Nvidia. The Chinese developers had made a new technology for generating AI responses generally available. And this in turn drives the demand for chips from Nvidia, argued Huang. This is because such AI models sometimes require 100 times more computing power than previous software.
Investors are cautious
For the current quarter, Nvidia predicted a consolidated turnover of 43 billion dollars - with the caveat that it could be two percent higher or lower. On average, analysts had expected a forecast of around 42 billion dollars.
Nevertheless, Nvidia shares fell by around 1.5 percent in US after-hours trading. One of the concerns of investors is that even tougher restrictions on the sale of modern Nvidia chips to China could slow down the company's business.
