Several Silicon Valley bigwigs reported their financial results this week, and eagle-eyed AI investors are watching them more closely than Swifties looking for signs that Reputation (Taylor’s Version) is dropping.
Nvidia has still got it…sort of. Shares fell 8.48% today despite what appear at first glance to be solid numbers.
- Sales boomed in Q4: Revenue growth jumped 78% over the quarter and 114% year over year to reach $130.5 billion.
- But that monster growth is actually a slowdown from Q1, when revenue tripled.
- Nvidia’s guidance for its gross margin came in at 71%, slightly lower than analyst expectations of 73%.
Salesforce is betting big on AI, but the cloud software company stumbled after the bell yesterday, and shares sank 4.09% today.
- Earnings per share came in higher than expected, but the company posted revenue of $9.99 billion, missing the $10.04 billion projected by analysts.
- The firm’s second-generation Agentforce AI platform—which responds to employee’s Slack questions—isn’t pulling its weight as much as investors hoped it would. Executives said Agentforce will only make a small contribution to revenue all the way into 2026. Try asking Slack what that’s about.
Snowflake, however, came in to save the day for AI investors. The data analytics firm jumped 4.51%.
- Beyond handily beating earnings and revenue expectations, Snowflake projected annual 2026 product revenue growth of $4.28 billion—a 24% jump, and higher than analyst expectations of $4.21 billion.
- The firm also said it had already integrated its platform—Snowflake Cortex AI—with OpenAI’s model.
Making sense of market moves
Stay up to date on the latest market news with daily analysis of the investing landscape, served up Brew-style.
The big picture: Analysts are still largely bullish on Nvidia, Salesforce, and Snowflake, with the consensus among the pros being “overweight” for each stock. But even if the AI trade isn’t dead, a lot of the juice has been squeezed out—and the bar for these companies to prove they’re still growing will just get higher from here.
Although Nvidia may have beaten allegations that DeepSeek made its newest chips completely irrelevant, investors are still shook about the results the Chinese startup achieved with so few resources. That’s not the only headwind the AI trade is fighting against: President Trump’s tariffs proposals could seriously hurt these companies’ bottom lines. And on top of all that, capex cutting could begin this year, making it even more challenging for these AI leaders to meet the lofty goals they’ve spent the last year promising investors they’ll achieve. No wonder investors are wary.—LB