NVIDIA Crushes Earnings: Stock Pops 6% as AI Chip Dominance Continues

NVIDIA just dropped a monster quarter that sent shares up 6% in after-hours trading. Here’s what actually happened:

The Numbers That Matter:

• Q3 earnings hit $1.30/share, beating estimates by 4.84%
• Revenue climbed to $57.01B—a 62% YoY jump and crushed the consensus by 4.14%
• Operating cash flow: $23.75B in the quarter alone

Where the Money’s Coming From:

Data Center is basically printing money right now. It pulled in $51.22B (90% of total revenue), up 66% YoY and 25% QoQ. The Blackwell GPU platform is flying off the shelves—enterprises are absolutely desperate for inference capacity for LLMs and generative AI applications.

Gaming revenue was $4.27B (up 30% YoY but dipped 1% QoQ), while Professional Visualization hit $760M, driven by the new DGX Spark launch.

The Margin Story: Non-GAAP gross margin at 73.6% is actually down 140bps YoY because Blackwell datacenter systems have different margins than last year’s Hopper products. But sequentially it improved 90bps—that’s the efficiency ramp kicking in.

Forward Guidance = More Upside: Management just guided Q4 revenue to $65B (±2%), which is $4.7B higher than Wall Street expected at $60.3B. Translation: the AI boom isn’t slowing down.

The Cash Position: NVIDIA’s sitting on $60.6B in cash and equivalents while dumping serious money back to shareholders—$12.46B in buybacks last quarter alone, with a fresh $60B authorization approved.

Bottom line: NVIDIA’s not just beating earnings—it’s showing that the AI infrastructure buildout is accelerating, not plateauing. The company’s scale advantage keeps widening, and there’s no real competition in sight for premium GPU capacity.