Tech
Nvidia reported another blowout quarter on Wednesday, delivering a beat on topline metrics that was strong enough to send the stock up 4% in extended trading. Analysts on the earnings call couldn’t get over the 70% growth projection for 2028 revenue delivered by the California-based chipmaker, especially since CFO Colette Kress qualified it as a “supply-constrained outlook.” While there had been a lot of chatter prior to the call about additional buybacks, possible price increases and tweaks to the company’s capital allocations as a propellant for the stock, the headline for analysts was clearly the revenue growth guidance and its implications for the overall staying power of the AI buildout. “What gives you the confidence to guide a full-year out? You haven’t been doing that,” Joseph Moore, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, asked CEO Jensen Huang. Stacy Rasgon, semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, noted the 70% growth call would represent a “$200 billion uptick versus the prior outlook.” In total, there were four separate questions from analysts about the fiscal 2028 revenue estimate, most of them centering on the issue of what growth would look like if it weren’t constrained by supply chain factors, notably shortages in component memory chips. Huang said, “The unconstrained [outlook] would be a lot higher.” “The unconstrained is significant, and so we’re just going to have to go work hard to get more capacity,” he told Rasgon. The forecast from Nvidia, which is arguably the single most important company in the global computing infrastructure buildout, is likely to reinvigorate narratives around the so-called artificial intelligence supercycle. As opposed to refocusing efforts on returns to shareholders or margin expansion, the company appears to be still in the throes of its mainline expansion, pairing its boosted projections with financing initiatives to help make them a reality. While the company’s revenue is set to expand, its customer base – which consists largely of the cloud computing giants that run enterprise workloads for businesses – appears to be growing more concentrated. Just five customers accounted for a total of 70% of the company’s accounts receivable as of the end of July, Nvidia said in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “[That’s] up from 56% a year ago,” financial writer Ed Zitron wrote in a social media post .
Nvidia’s 70% sales growth projection for 2028 wows analysts on earnings call
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