We’re about to find out if Jensen Huang can get investors to snap out of their AI panic

Despite the chip giant reporting a record $30 billion in revenue in its last quarter — up 122% year-on-year — its shares fell by almost $200 billion immediately after Huang’s earnings call with investors.

Days later, on September 3, the company suffered a historic $279 billion loss in market value, the single biggest one-day decline experienced by a US company ever. Given the record revenue results, it’s worth asking why.

First, Nvidia’s 122% year-on-year revenue growth in the last quarter was smaller than the 262% growth it recorded in the previous quarter. It got investors wondering if growth might be slowing down.

As Beauchamp noted, one of the worries among investors from the latest results was that “they can’t sustain momentum or meet demand.”

Questions over momentum have grown as Nvidia’s small base of Big Tech customers, such as Google and Microsoft, spent the summer telling the market not to expect returns any time soon from their massive capital expenditure on expensive AI hardware and infrastructure.

An estimate from analysts at investment bank Bernstein earlier this year suggested that capital expenditure on AI, including spending on GPUs from Nvidia, could exceed $1 trillion in the next five years.

The concerns over returns have created a more anxious sentiment in the market, with investors questioning if they should be as willing to buy into the hype as they once were. “That might change again, but for the moment, people are fairly skeptical,” Beauchamp said.

On the question of whether Nvidia can “meet demand,” concerns have risen over delays in the rollout of the company’s latest Blackwell GPU.

As my colleague Emma Cosgrove wrote in August, the processor, which was first announced in March, has faced issues in “reaching high production volume,” per details from analysts at industry research firm Semianalysis.

As Huang takes the stage on Wednesday, investors will want details on the status of Blackwell. Whether that will address fears is uncertain for Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at research firm Forrester.

“I do not believe that Jensen is able to say anything that will quell investors’ nerves,” he said. “Nvidia is the face of generative AI and that means that they are getting outsized reactions from anything good and bad.”

Huang’s task is unenviable.