Is Nvidia proof that the AI sector is economically sustainable? The company’s recent very strong earnings have temporarily reassured investors across the entire industry

In recent months, among the shareholders of numerous tech companies, concerns had grown that the enormous investments made in the field of artificial intelligence might turn out to be unjustified – or rather: not up to expectations. These concerns had contributed to lowering the valuations of many companies in the sector. A few days ago, however, Nvidia – a leading company in the chip production market serving AI systems – published quarterly results that were significantly above expectations, which brought relief to the entire field.

The news restored confidence in the sector, which has long been burdened by significant production costs for a technology that does not always manage to generate revenues capable of sustaining them. For this reason, many institutions – including the International Monetary Fund – had repeatedly warned of the possible formation of a bubble in the tech sector, and especially in the field of artificial intelligence.

Why Nvidia Is Doing So Well

What worried analysts was the possibility that the enthusiasm – considered by many already excessive – surrounding artificial intelligence would drastically fade in a short period of time. In such a scenario, the value of many large tech companies would have suffered a significant drop, with direct repercussions on U.S. economic growth, which today is driven precisely by the AI sector. A setback of this magnitude, considering the enormous volume of investments already concentrated in the field, could have triggered a chain crisis, capable of quickly spreading beyond the United States and involving multiple continents.

Nvidia, led by Taiwan-born American entrepreneur Jensen Huang, has nonetheless managed to stabilize the entire sector, reshuffling the deck – at least for the moment: in the last ninety days, the tech company generated $57 billion in revenue, and nearly 90% of this comes from its data center division – the facilities that store and manage large quantities of data, essentially powering AI systems, among other things. Revenue forecasts for the next quarter are instead at $65 billion. Both figures have been welcomed as very positive signals by investors, who had previously made more cautious estimates.

More generally, Nvidia’s recent commercial results have been interpreted as an indicator of the overall performance of the artificial intelligence sector, reassuring investors about the strong demand for these systems and helping legitimize the large investments planned in the field.

And What About Anthropic?

Another company that is managing to monetize substantially thanks to its technologies in the field of artificial intelligence is Anthropic. The U.S. company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, generates 80% of its revenue through Claude Enterprise, the division that sells AI services to large corporations – including IBM. Thanks to this strategy, Anthropic now holds one-third of the market for artificial intelligence systems aimed at businesses, surpassing OpenAI itself – which two years ago controlled about half of it.

From the start, the company also invested in the automatic generation of computer code, one of the most widespread applications of language models: with its Claude Code service, Anthropic now covers over 40% of this segment, while OpenAI stops at about 20%. Anthropic, moreover, unlike Sam Altman’s company, has chosen to avoid expanding into areas such as the automatic generation of videos and images – this type of output, in fact, is very costly both in energy and computational power, and remains economically unsustainable.