Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told employees this week that the company has been pushed into a no-win situation by mounting fears of an AI bubble, even as it continues to post blockbuster results, according to audio of an internal all-hands meeting reviewed by Business Insider.
“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.
A blowout quarter that spooked investors
On paper, Nvidia gave investors about everything they had asked for. The chipmaker reported another surge in sales of its data-center processors, the workhorses that power large AI models (and Nvidia’s revenues), and raised its guidance for the current quarter. It was the kind of performance expected to kick off another six-month rally, investors were saying.
Instead, the stock’s initial jump gave way to a broad selloff. Nvidia climbed as much as 5% early in Thursday’s session before closing down roughly 3%, as traders rotated out of the Big Tech names most closely associated with the AI boom.
The reversal extended what has become a bruising stretch for the so-called AI trade. After months of a breathless rally, investors are increasingly anxious that tech giants are spending too aggressively on data centers, GPUs, and networking gear, with no guarantee they can earn enough revenue to get those investments back. Some are also focusing on the complex, debt-heavy financing structures behind the AI infrastructure build-out, with credit markets starting to flash early warning signs.
Layered on top of that are fresh macro jitters. A shutdown-delayed U.S. jobs report, released the same morning, showed stronger-than-expected hiring in September, but a higher unemployment rate; this conflicting data did little to clarify whether the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in December.
Some investors are closely watching different statements from Fed presidents to try to read the tea leaves, but with the earnings season winding down and no obvious catalyst between now and the Fed’s next decision, it appears that many other investors are using the volatility to lock in profits from the year’s earlier rally—and get out of the market.
“The broader narrative hasn’t broken; it’s simply being tested right now,” Mark Hackett at Nationwide told Bloomberg. “Periods like this often act as a release valve rather than signaling a true trend reversal.
‘We’re basically holding the planet together‘
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.”
That level of mythos has helped propel Nvidia’s market value into the stratosphere, making it the world’s most valuable public company. But Huang made clear that it has also turned every earnings day into a high-wire act.
“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.
Joking about losing $500 billion
Amidst the pressure, Huang kept the meeting light with whistling-past-the-graveyard-esqe 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.”
Huang told employees he was “delighted” by the quarter and proud of their work, stressing the company’s underlying business remains strong even if markets are punishing them for it.
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