“The market did not appreciate our incredible quarter,” Huang said on Thursday, less than 24 hours after Nvidia reported another set of record earnings and said it had “visibility” into half a trillion dollars of revenue lined up for the rest of 2025 and 2026.
Instead of rewarding the beat, investors delivered a shocking reversal that saw shares briefly rising Thursday before turning lower, dragging down the broader AI trade by the end of the session.
Huang said expectations around Nvidia have become so extreme that Wall Street now sees danger in both directions.
“If we delivered a bad quarter, it is evidence there’s an AI bubble. If we delivered a great quarter, we are fueling the AI bubble,” he told employees. “If we were off by just a hair, if it looked even a little bit creaky, the whole world would’ve fallen apart.”
The comments offer a rare glimpse into how the face of the AI boom views the growing backlash to it, and how closely he is watching the market’s whiplash response.
Inside Nvidia, Huang suggested no one should be surprised that investors are jumpy when so much of the AI story is being projected onto a single company.
He referenced online memes that jokingly describe Nvidia as the linchpin of the global economy and the only thing standing between the U.S. and recession.
“Have you guys seen some of them?” he asked employees. “We’re basically holding the planet together—and it’s not untrue.”
“The expectations are so high that if we miss by just a little bit, people think the whole story is broken,” he said.
Still, Huang pushed back on the idea that Nvidia is responsible for the frothier parts of the AI trade. The company’s job, he emphasized, is to build the compute infrastructure others need, not to police how the market prices demand.
Amid the pressure, Huang kept the meeting light with whistling-past-the-graveyard-esque humor about Nvidia’s wild swings.
He joked about the “good old days” when the company had a $5 trillion market capitalization, a playful exaggeration of its actual peak valuation—before noting just how much value has evaporated in recent weeks.
“Nobody in history has ever lost $500 billion in a few weeks,” he said. “You’ve got to be worth a lot to lose $500 billion in a few weeks.”
