A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Today, Nvidia has to prove whether it's living up to the hype. The tech company is now the darling of the AI boom, so Wall Street expectations are high for its latest quarterly earnings report. NPR's Maria Aspan has a preview.
MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: Nvidia is already the hands-down winner of the artificial intelligence frenzy. That's because it provides the semiconductors that big companies are using to develop this new technology. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon and others are spending billions of dollars on AI, and they've said they expect to spend billions more, which is why analysts like Matt Bryson are so excited about Nvidia. He's at Wedbush Securities.
MATT BRYSON: It certainly is a bellwether for technology, a bellwether for AI.
ASPAN: And AI, he says, has the power to change almost everything in our world. Bryson expects Nvidia to report that it brought in $30 billion in sales in just the last three months. That's more than double what it did a year earlier. Granted, that $30 billion is still only a fraction of what bigger and better-known tech companies, like Apple or Microsoft, bring in every quarter.
But Nvidia is also drawing so much attention because it's powering the overall stock market and this year's tech boom. Yet this summer, Nvidia's stock price has gone up and down. Investors are getting more worried that tech companies are spending too much on AI without getting enough return on their investment. Andy Li thinks those investors might have a point. He's an analyst for CreditSights, and he warns that, at some point, big tech companies are going to stop gobbling up as many Nvidia chips and start working to make those investments pay off.
ANDY LI: Everybody's very focused on, like, when that digestion phase is coming. Obviously, it'll come at Nvidia's detriment.
ASPAN: But for the time being, Andy Li says, Nvidia's customers still seem pretty hungry.
Maria Aspan, NPR News, New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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