Nvidia gets tepid reaction to forecast, boosts investor rewards

Sales in the three months ending in July will be $91 billion, the company said in a statement late Wednesday. Though analysts estimated $87 billion on average, projections ranged as high as $96 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Nvidia also dialed up its shareholder rewards, with the company increasing its quarterly dividend to 25 cents a share from a penny. And the company announced $80 billion in stock repurchases.  

The outlook let down investors who have grown accustomed to Nvidia shattering expectations. The company also is facing the first major challenges to its dominance in AI computing, with a variety of chipmakers trying to carve out of a piece of the business. 

Nvidia shares fell less than 1% in late trading after the results, from the company’s first quarter, were released. They had gained 20% this year, a performance that outpaced the S&P 500 but lagged most major chip peers.

Nvidia is the top seller of so-called AI accelerators, chips used to develop artificial intelligence models. But it faces growing competition from across Silicon Valley. Advanced Micro Devices has rival processors, and Broadcom and Alphabet’s Google are attacking the market with their own technology.

For now, Nvidia has an enviable position — with Wall Street predicting that the company’s revenue will account for more than a third of the entire semiconductor sector’s sales this year. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has stuck to his assertions that Nvidia will continue to deliver unprecedented growth as demand remains strong for the foreseeable future.

Data center spending—the main source of Nvidia’s revenue—hasn’t shown signs of letting up. The major spenders in this area, a group known as hyperscalers, plan to shell out a combined roughly $725 billion on AI this year.

Read More: Alphabet, Amazon Outpace Meta in AI During Earnings Bonanza

That hasn’t just buoyed sales of accelerators. General-purpose CPUs, or central processing units, also are in greater demand. That’s lifted results for Intel and AMD. Chip upstarts are getting a boost as well: Cerebras Systems, which offers a novel product based on large pieces of silicon, had the year’s biggest initial public offering last week. 

Read More: AI Chipmaker Cerebras Climbs 68% After Year’s Biggest IPO

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia doesn’t just sell accelerators. It offers a range of chips, as well as networking, software, AI models and even complete computer systems. That helps make its reach and capabilities unassailable, Nvidia management has argued. The company has said it has more orders than it can fill and is investing to add supply to meet that flood of demand.

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