That sound you hear isn't the pop of the AI bubble — it's every company that relies on the AI economy breathing a huge sigh of relief.
NVIDIA, the king of fancy GPU chips that power most AI models, just beat market expectations again. During the third quarter of 2025, the company made $57 billion in revenue; this was $2 billion more than most Wall Street analysts expected.
Even better for NVIDIA, and for the whole AI economy, almost all that extra revenue came from the company's data center business — which is where the rubber of AI models meets the road of the internet.
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The one NVIDIA division that came in lower than estimates was its gaming chip business — which AI world need not care about.
"Sales are off the charts," NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said of the company's Blackwell chips, its latest GPU model, in a statement. "Cloud GPUs are sold out." For the fourth quarter of 2025, the company predicts even higher total revenue of $65 billion.
Huang went on to claim that the "AI ecosystem" had "entered a virtuous cycle" and was "scaling fast." The CEO denied as recently as October that we're in an AI bubble; now he seems to be saying this growth can last indefinitely.
Will the AI bubble still burst?
That bubble still exists, however. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and almost every other business in the space have so far failed to show any revenue growth from all the AI services that rely on NVIDIA chips. But given that almost all the market focus is on the health of NVIDIA's business, these companies effectively just got more runway in which to prove themselves.
As invulnerable as NVIDIA looks now, there was bad news for Jensen Huang in Google's recent announcement of its latest top AI model, Gemini 3. The model "was trained using Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)," the company says — in other words, not NVIDIA GPUs.
If Google, whose CEO has admitted there is a bubble, becomes a major player in the AI chip space, price wars between Google and NVIDIA could result. But that too could lift the players that rely on AI compute, making it significantly cheaper to provide services.
In other words, don't count on the AI bubble popping immediately — but don't count it out, either. At least, not after NVIDIA's next quarterly earnings report, due in January 2026.
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
