Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shrugs off DeepSeek as sales soar

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is as bullish as ever about his company’s future, repeating his sentiments that DeepSeek won’t impact sales, he said during the latest earnings call on Wednesday.

Speculation that DeepSeek’s R1 model required far fewer chips to train fueled a record drop in Nvidia’s stock price last month. 

But during the earnings call, Huang touted R1 as an “excellent innovation,” emphasizing that it and other “reasoning” models are great news for Nvidia since they need so much more compute.

“Reasoning models can consume 100 times more compute, and future reasoning models will consume much more compute,” Huang said. “DeepSeek R1 has ignited global enthusiasm. It’s an excellent innovation, but even more importantly, it has open sourced a world-class reasoning AI model. Nearly every AI developer is applying R1.”

Nvidia’s sales show no signs of slowing down. Nvidia reported another record-breaking quarter that saw its revenue reach $39.3 billion — exceeding both its own projections and Wall Street estimates. And it said it expects revenue for the next quarter to be up again, to around $43 billion.

Nvidia’s data center sales nearly doubled in 2024 to $115 billion and rose 16% from the previous quarter, per the tech giant’s earnings release.

During the call, Huang touted Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chip as being custom-built for reasoning and said that current demand for it is “extraordinary.”

“We will grow strongly in 2025,” Huang said.

Indeed, despite last month’s panic over DeepSeek, the market for AI chips shows no signs of cooling off.

Since then, Meta, Google, and Amazon have all unveiled massive AI infrastructure investments, collectively committing hundreds of billions for the coming years.