All eyes were on Nvidia this week ahead of what was deemed to be a portentous sales forcast for Q4, with many expecting slowed growth that would be indicitive of an incoming AI bubble burst as companies grapple to turn AI hype into tangible ROI.

There’s plenty of compelling data to inform the panic, a recent Atlassian report claimed that only 4% of senior executives reported major improvements in organisational efficiency, innovation, or work quality as a result of AI adoption.

However, turns out there was no need for concern, as the monolithic chipmaker reported another quarter of stronger-than-expected revenues, easing investor concerns over whether the soaring levels of AI spending are sustainable.

In a statement, the company said revenue for the three months to October jumped 62% to $57bn, fuelled by relentless demand for its chips used in AI data centres. Sales from that division alone rose 66% to more than $51bn.

Fourth-quarter sales forecasts of up to $65bn also exceeded market expectations, sending Nvidia shares up roughly 4% in after-hours trading.

Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company, is widely regarded as a bellwether for the AI boom due to its dominance in the GPU market.

Its latest results had drawn intense scrutiny from investors after a period of volatility on Wall Street, where concerns of an AI bubble had driven four consecutive daily declines in the S&P 500. The benchmark index has fallen nearly 3% so far in November amid mounting debate over whether AI investments can justify their valuations.

Many have compared the rapid rise in AI-linked stocks to the dotcom era of the late 1990s, when optimism around early internet technologies fuelled a surge in valuations before the bubble burst in 2000, resulting in not only swathes of companies going under, but setting pensions back for years to come.

Pressure was intense heading into Nvidia’s earnings release. Earlier on Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang appeared alongside Elon Musk at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington to announce a major new data centre complex in Saudi Arabia, which will use hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips. Musk’s AI company, xAI, will be the facility’s first customer.

Nvidia remains deeply embedded in the AI ecosystem, powering platforms operated by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and model developers including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta.

The company is also entwined in a growing web of investments among AI firms, including its $100bn commitment to OpenAI – it should be noted than many of the biggest investments are circular, with these companies investing hugely in each other, which could be deemed as problematic.

Huang dismisses “AI bubble” fears

Amid rising market debate over whether the AI boom is overheating, Jensen Huang directly rejected concerns that a bubble is forming.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” he told investors on the earnings call. He argued that demand for GPUs continues to accelerate as industries transition away from CPU-based systems.

Huang said the slowdown of Moore’s Law had pushed traditional CPU computing “to its limits,” prompting sectors such as data processing, search and recommendation systems to adopt GPU-driven architectures better suited for modern AI workloads.

He added that AI is now enabling entirely new categories of applications, from generative models reshaping search and engineering tools to emerging systems capable of reasoning, planning and acting with minimal human input. These “agentic” and “physical” AI applications, including coding assistants and robotics, will require unprecedented levels of compute power in the years ahead.

According to Huang, Nvidia’s “single, unified architecture” positions it uniquely to support all three major transitions underway across AI and industry. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years,” he said.

The company’s official press release reinforced that momentum: “Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out,” said Huang. “Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference — each growing exponentially. We’ve entered the virtuous cycle of AI.”

Rising GPU demand resonates in the UK market

The global appetite for GPUs is also being felt in the UK. Scottish refurbished-technology specialist ETB Technologies has reported a near-doubling of GPU sales year-on-year, with revenue up 33%.

The company said units sold increased 31% compared with the same period last year, driven by particularly strong uptake across SMEs, as well as the consumer and healthcare sectors. ETB said the surge reflects growing demand for high-performance compute among organisations embracing AI and data-driven applications.

According to the firm, demand is also rising in sectors such as aerospace, automotive and biomedical genetics, where scientific and engineering simulations increasingly rely on GPU acceleration.

Recommended reading

• AI Adoption Hits 90% Among Developers, Google Report Finds
• NVIDIA Invests £11BN into UK AI Infrastructure
• OpenAI Publishes Largest Study on ChatGPT to Date

The trend aligns with wider market forecasts. A recent Research and Markets report suggests the global GPU market could grow from $63.22bn today to $592.18bn by 2033 – a trajectory fuelled by rapid AI adoption and expanding use of simulation, modelling and data-intensive workloads.

With Nvidia positioned at the core of AI’s global infrastructure, investors are now weighing whether the current spending cycle is a temporary spike or a long-term shift. Huang urged analysts to focus on structural changes reshaping the industry rather than fears of overheating.

AI, he said, is “going everywhere, doing everything, all at once” – and the chips powering it are still in short supply.

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