Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO and co-founder.
NVIDIA has entered several key partnerships and shrugged off concerns of an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble as it reports record revenue up 62% from a year ago in its third quarter to end-October.
Nasdaq-listed NVIDIA overnight reported revenue of $57 billion (R980 billion) for the period, exceeding analysts’ expectations as income gained 22% quarter-on-quarter and 62% year-on-year. For the last quarter of the year, it expects revenue of around $65 billion (R1.117 trillion).
NVIDIA has entered “the virtuous cycle of AI. The AI ecosystem is scaling fast – with more new foundation model makers, more AI start-ups, across more industries, and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once,” says Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO.
“Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs [graphics processing units] are sold out,” says Huang, dispelling talk of an AI bubble. “Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference – each growing exponentially.”
NVIDIA, which claims to be the largest networking business in the world, has booked $500 billion in orders for its advanced chips through to 2026. This is amid expectations that the industry will spend between $3 trillion and $4 trillion a year on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade.
The industry’s planned investment comes as shareholders are increasingly jittery over a potential bubble. JP Morgan has said: “We don’t think caution around AI is unwarranted.”
JP Morgan, a global financial services firm, said in an October note that “as this story unfolds, investors should focus on selectivity, leaning into active management to separate transformative winners from bubbly valuations”.
NVIDIA’s shares were trading 2.85% higher this morning and are up 34.56% over the year so far.
The company, among the world’s largest chipmakers, recently made history when it became the first of the so-called Magnificent Seven to breach $5 trillion (R86 trillion at this morning’s exchange rate of R17.20) in market capitalisation.
However, its value has since dropped to $4.53 trillion (R77.88 trillion), even though it is still the world’s most valuable company.
NVIDIA’s stock is up 34.86% since January.
In addition to record results, NVIDIA announced key partnerships, among which was a strategic relationship with ChatGPT-owner OpenAI, to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure.
It has also formed partnerships with industry leaders, including Google Cloud, Microsoft, Oracle and xAI, to build America’s AI infrastructure with hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs.
The company will collaborate with its fierce competitor, Intel, to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data centre and PC products with NVIDIA NVLink – a high-speed interconnect technology that provides a direct, high-bandwidth connection between GPUs, or between GPUs and central processing units, to improve performance in systems that use multiple processors.
In addition, it revealed plans to accelerate seven new supercomputers, including working with Oracle to build the US Department of Energy’s largest AI supercomputer, Solstice, along with another system, Equinox, both of which will be home to thousands of Blackwell GPUs.
CFO Colette Kress says NVIDIA’s data centre business hit a record $51.2 billion in the third quarter, up 66% from a year ago, driven by three key platform shifts: accelerated computing, advanced AI models and agentic applications.
At the same time, networking revenue rose to a record $8.2 billion, a 162% increase from a year ago, while gaming revenue climbed 30% year-on-year as it launched Borderlands 4, Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders, says Kress.
Kress adds that professional visualisation grew 56% from a year ago, with automotive revenue up 32% year-on-year.
Ahead of the results, Barchart.com said US stocks had declined, with the S&P 500 Index down 0.92% on Monday, and the key tech Nasdaq 100 Index dropping 0.83%. However, Bloomberg noted that NVIDIA’s numbers led to both the chipmaker and the broader market tracking higher.
In the first nine months of the 2026 financial year, NVIDIA returned $37 billion (R636.50 billion) to shareholders in the form of shares repurchased and cash dividends. It is set to pay its next quarterly cash dividend of $0.01 (R0.17) per share on 26 December 2025.
