Cash torrent pouring into Nvidia slows – despite booming Blackwell adoption
May we all have problems like annual revenue growth dropping from 126 to 114 percent
Nvidia's astounding recent growth leveled off in the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, the 12 months to January 26, but the GPU titan is still producing enviable numbers.
Q4 2025 revenue was $39.3 billion, $11 billion from Blackwell parts alone, earlier defect be damned, and a 12 percent sequential jump from Q3 2025. Profit for the quarter reached $22 billion, 14 percent up from Q3. That kind of low double-digit growth from one quarter to the next is Nvidia’s new normal.
A year-over-year view produced bigger numbers, as Q4 2025 revenue was 78 percent higher than the same period last year. Profit rose 80 percent.
Full-year revenue for FY 2025 grew 114 percent to $130 billion, less than the 126 percent reported in the previous year.
In FY 2024, profits leapt 581 percent from the $4.36 billion recorded in FY2023 to nearly $30 billion. In FY 2025, profits grew a mere 145 percent to $72.9 billion.
To be clear, Nvidia is still making plenty of dough. It’s just not growing as quickly as it has in past quarters and years. The Silicon Valley goliath forecast a bumper Q1 2026, though: A 9.4 percent quarter-on-quarter revenue increase, or about 65 percent year-over-year to roughly $43 billion.
CFO Colette Kress and CEO Jensen Huang remain optimistic that demand for AI infrastructure will continue as Nvidia ramps production of its Blackwell accelerators.
Looking ahead, Kress expects orders for Blackwell to drive considerable growth as customers look to deploy ever larger, more complex clusters requiring not just the corporation's AI accelerators, but its high-speed NVLink switch interconnects, and Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum-X networking kit.
"With Blackwell it will be common for these clusters to start with 100,000 GPUs or more," Kress predicted on a call earlier today with Wall Street analysts, adding that the chip giant is already working with a customer on a 200,000 GPU cluster using its NVLink and InfiniBand interconnects.
Nvidia is counting on next-gen AI models and a shift from training to widespread inferencing deployments to drive these sales.
"The amount of tokens generated, the amount of inference, compute needed is already 100 times more than the one-shot examples and the one-shot capabilities of large language models in the beginning," Huang said of models like OpenAI's o3-mini or DeepSeek's R1.
He also highlighted the continued need for compute to drive pre- and post-training workloads, such as reinforcement learning — the technique used by DeepSeek to give R1 its "thinking" capabilities, for one.
However, Nvidia also faces ongoing geopolitical pressures due in large part to US export controls on AI technologies and the specter of a hefty semiconductor tariff on foreign-made silicon imported into America. Nvidia has long relied on South Korean and Taiwanese fabs to build its chips. While chipmakers in both nations have or are in the process of bringing US-based plants online, it isn't clear just how much demand those stateside plants can satisfy.
Kress described the impact of tariffs as “a little bit of an unknown … until we understand further what the US government's plan is; what its timing is, where, and how much."
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Digging deeper into Nvidia's $35.6 billion in datacenter revenues for Q4 2025, we see that GPUs accounted for most of the moolah, with networking delivering $3 billion – a nine percent decline from this time last year.
Kress expressed optimism that networking revenues will rebound in the coming quarters, pointing to the corp's deepening relationship with Cisco that will see the network giant run its NX-OS operating system on Nvidia's Spectrum-X kit.
Gaming revenue fared worse, falling 11 percent year-over-year and 22 percent from the past quarter to $2.54 billion. With that said, the biz only recently started selling new cards for gamers.
Nvidia's professional visualization, OEM, and automotive business units all did better, growing 10 percent, 40 percent, and 103 percent respectively. Collectively these divisions managed to rake in $1.2 billion in revenues.
Investors seem unfussed by the news. Nvidia shares opened Wednesday at $129.92, popped past $133 ahead of its earnings announcement, jumped another dollar or so after its earnings announcement, then settled to $129.32 in after-hours trading. That’s $2.69 higher than the price when the market closed on Tuesday. ®