Closing Bell - Closing Bell Overtime: Nvidia Earnings From Every Angle, Plus Results From Salesforce, Snowflake 2/26/25

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

A packed market panel as Bespoke’s Paul Hickey, Hightower’s Stephanie Link, and Moor Insights’ Patrick Moorhead join to break down earnings from Salesforce, eBay, Paramount, Snowflake, Synopsys, and AI player C3.ai. The panel sticks around for the big one: Nvidia. We have you covered from every angle. We also hear from Jefferies’ Brent Thill on Salesforce & Snowflake, CFRA’s Angelo Zino on Nvidia, and Bessemer’s Byron Deeter on AI’s broader impact.

Well, that's hand of regulation, folio beyond ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. And Perskolas doing the honors at the NASDAQ. Major averages giving up sizable early gains, turning red midday, but then getting a late session pop. Looks like we may have finished just above the midpoint, the flat line for the S&P. But that market volatility really dragging here. The scorecard on Wall Street, that's it. The action's just getting started. Welcome to Closing Bell Overtime.

I'm Morgan Brennan with John Ford. And it's the moment that could set the tone for the market. Four times a year, we get a look inside the health of one of the most important companies at the forefront of the AI revolution, NVIDIA. Those quarterly results are coming up in just minutes. And it's not just NVIDIA either. We're also going to get earnings this hour from Salesforce, Snowflake, Paramount, eBay, C3.AI and Synopsys and actually many more. But as we await those earnings, let's bring in Bespoke Investment Group

co-founder Paul Hickey and Hightower chief investment strategist and CNBC contributor Stephanie Link, along with More Insights and Strategy CEO Patrick Moorhead. It's great to have you all here in what has been a topsy-turvy day for the market. So before I get into what we should expect from the tech names that are on deck here, Stephanie, just want to get your thoughts on the action we have seen more broadly in the markets, which really was propelled, particularly in the afternoon, by the latest trade comments from President Trump. It's been a wild year so far, let alone day, right? I think the market is jittery because there are a lot of unknowns. We've gotten some soft economic data, although we're still running about 2% GDP growth, which is above trend.

But every day it's tariffs on, tariffs off. It's just speculation. We don't know. The government layoffs, the maybe government shutdown, NVIDIA being 6% of the S&P 500. Is everybody on edge? So all of these things are creating this volatility. In addition, we've got Salesforce earnings out. So stay with us. Sima Modi has the numbers for Salesforce. Sima. It is a beat on earnings for Salesforce in the fourth quarter. Morgan, $2.78 adjusted versus the street expectation of $2.61. Revenue was a slight miss at $9.9 billion. Estimate was for $10.03 billion. So that's perhaps what is contributing to shares of Salesforce moving lower in overtime by 9%. Let's get you some more details on AgentForce. It's AI agents. Since October, the company revealing that 5,000 AgentForce deals, including more than 3,000 paid, have come to fruition. Data clouds are passing 15 trillion records, which did double year over year, I might add. So we'll get you more details as we comb

through these numbers here and also commentary from CEO Mark Benioff, which I can just bring you right now. We had an incredible quarter and year, he says, with strong performance across all our key metrics, including the highest cash flow in our company's history and more than $60 billion in RPO. He says they're no better position than Salesforce to lead customers through the digital labor revolution with our deeply unified platform. So once again, touting the company's AI products and the leadership that they are playing, stock is now down 6 percent. Back to you. All right. Sima Modi, thank you. Don't miss Jim Cramer's exclusive interview with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff.

That is coming up on Mad Money at 6 p.m. Eastern. Stephanie, I cut you off. I'm going to go back to you. And we're just going to jump right into some of these tech earnings we're getting, starting here with Salesforce. Yes, I mean, this is a maturing tech company. Perhaps not surprising to hear highest cash flow in company history, but that top line miss. Where does that take us, given the fact that there's been so much focus on Salesforce re-accelerating growth I mean you're you're growing like 9% organic growth and the stock is trading at 26 times EBITDA and even though the stock is down 8% year-to-date what do you pay for a single digit probably the C RPOs bookings right it's probably single digits, upper single digits.

Total revenues up about 9 percent. Margins. I really want to see what they're doing there. You have a new COO. You have a new CFO, the same person. And we don't know what the guidance is going to be. Is it going to be super conservative? Probably.

If I were a new COO and CFO, I would be. So not particularly, not horrible, but not great. And numbers probably have to get edged down. Yeah. Paul Hickey, it looks to me, and Seema Modi will come back with more, I'm sure that the full year revenue guide looks like a bit of a miss here on top of the revenue miss for Q4. So, I mean, if you're looking for a reason for the AI and growth story in the market that's been certainly suffering with a few stocks to accelerate, I don't imagine these Salesforce numbers give it to you. No, I mean, like you said, analysts were expecting revenues to pick up, as Stephanie was talking. They're not expecting more than, you know,

10 or 11 percent revenue growth per year out for the next several years here. So the fact that they're lowering guidance, you know, the stock isn't outlandishly expensive, but it's also not growing that much. So you tend to see this type of reaction in the stock. And, you know, we had that big report last quarter and it's just been selling off ever since then. Well, hold tight. Paramount Global earnings are out as well. Julia Boorstin has those numbers. Julia. That's right. Paramount missing on the top and bottom line. The company reporting an adjusted loss of 11 cents per share. That's compared to the 12 cent per share gain that analysts had expected. Revenues of 7.89 billion are below the 8.1 billion that analysts had estimated. You see shares are now down about 2%. Now breaking down these numbers, the linear TV business continues to weigh on

results. TV media revenue down 4% and adjusted Obida down 17% for that division. Streaming, though, does continue to be a bright spot with direct-to-consumer revenue up 8% year-over-year and Paramount Plus subscribers landing at 77.5 million. That's nearly a million more than anticipated. As for the Skydance deal, the company just reiterating that the transaction is expected to close in the first half of this year, but no real updates there.

John? All right, Julia, thank you. And as you were talking, Snowflake, Synopsys, C3 AI, eBay earnings all out. We are looking through those. We'll bring you those results as soon as we're ready with them. Pat Moorhead, NVIDIA coming up just shortly, less than 15 minutes from now, we expect. How important is that stock, not just to the semis overall, which it's led and sort of outperformed, but to the whole AI trade? I mean, it's the canary in the coal mine for the entire AI trade as its enabler for not only infrastructure, but also the downstream

adders like we saw from companies like Salesforce. And while there is an indirect relationship with the downstream impacts the market views it as a direct line. It's a little bit unfair but it is the first place you make an investment to build out the infrastructure that's required to deliver all of those endpoint consumer and enterprise services. Paul, I want to get your thoughts on the trade around NVIDIA, because, you know, the options market is pricing in a move that could be anywhere from 9% to 10% based on the earnings we get. But you've also pointed out that this is a stock that has, despite some of the large moves we've seen in recent weeks,

really been range-bound for the better part of eight or nine months. What does it take to break out from here? Yes, I think what it's going to take to break out from here is a, you know, some more, you know, they normally just guide for the quarter ahead, some more color going forward for several more quarters here. You know, all the hyperscalers have already said their short-term investments aren't changing. But what's going to look like going forward for the stock? What isn't great with NVIDIA is the fact that it's been declining in terms of its margin of guidance raises each

quarter recently. Margins have also been declining. Last quarter was the first non-triple play since the release of Chachi PT. But on the other end of the coin, expectations have come in a lot. We've been tempered a lot here. So the bar is pretty low. And overall market sentiment is very weak. The CNN fear greed index was an extreme fear today. So, you know, in that respect, when the bar is set low, the stock's down seven and a half percent over the last week. Historically, when you see that kind of sell off into earnings for the stock, its short-term reaction tends to be positive. Okay, we got those Snowflake numbers ready with the stock up 10%. Seema Modi, how do they look? John, a huge beat for Snowflake in the fourth quarter. 30 cents adjusted versus the street

expectation of 17 cents. Revenue topping consensus at 987 million dollars. The street was looking for nine fifty five. And that revenue growth is around 28 percent year over year. The company, in addition to announcing earnings, revealing that it has an expanded partnership with Microsoft to make open AI models available to users, which does mean that Snowflake as a data platform is now hosting Anthropic and open AI on its data platform. The street seems to like the news, even though the Q1 product revenue guidance was a bit light. Strong beat for the quarter. Shares are up 12.5%,

John. All right. Sima Modi, thank you. Also, don't miss an exclusive interview with Snowflake CEO. It's tomorrow, 4 p.m. here on Overtime. And we'll be running some of that interview throughout the day on CNBC tomorrow. Pat Moorhead, I want to go back to you on this because some investors might not be used to thinking about Snowflake as a platform for AI. But with Snowpark, they've been doing a lot of things. We heard from Amazon earlier today, Andy Jassy in town talking about Bedrock and all the models on top of that. How much of an advantage going forward is it to have an environment where software developers perhaps can build in AI more quickly, given that that's expected to fuel so much of the tech economy? Yeah, so first off, data platform is everything here. You know, one of the bright spots we even heard from Salesforce was data cloud. And data cloud and any type of data-related investment

is always a precursor to what other companies can do in the AI world. So I do believe that services like Snowflake, what Databricks is doing, and all the hyperscalers have their end-to-end data platforms. Let's not forget private company Cloudera out there who offers this as well. While we might not be very happy with the downstream impact, the data platform element has to be taken care of before we can see any of that AI magic downstream. And we're seeing those, I'll call them green shoots, even from companies like SAP. All right. Snowflake now up a little better than 13 percent. Patrick, Paul, Stephanie, don't go away. We're going to see all of you in just a moment for NVIDIA. Meantime, C3 AI earnings are out as well. That stock slightly positive. Pippa Stevens has the numbers. Pippa? Hey, John,

top and bottom line beat here. C3 AI reporting a 12 cent loss for the quarter. That was smaller than expected. Revenue coming in at 99 million ahead of the 98.1 million that Wall Street was looking for. Now, the company did say that they see their Q4 operating loss of 30 to 40 million, much smaller than the 41.9 million loss that Wall Street analysts were looking for. The company did say its revenue was up 26 percent year over year and also said it expanded its strategic partnerships with Microsoft and AWS. The stock marginally positive here. Guys? All right.

Pippa Stevens, thank you. We've got eBay earnings out. Courtney Reagan has those numbers. Hi, Court. Hi, Morgan. Yeah, so we got an earnings beat here for the fourth quarter for eBay, reporting $1.25 adjusted. The street was looking for $1.20 adjusted. Revenues slightly better than expected, just ever so slight at $2.58 billion. The street was looking for $2. Revenues slightly better than expected, just ever so slight at 2.58 billion.

The street was looking for 2.57 billion. We should note that the gross merchandise volume, that's another metric we look at here on a platform like eBay, was up 4 percent to 19.3 billion dollars. For the first quarter earnings guidance, it does look like the earnings guidance is in line with a range of 132 to 136 per share, though the first quarter revenue guidance coming in a little light. The company calling for 2.52 billion to 2.56 billion. The street expecting 2.59 billion. We believe that's the reason why you're seeing the share sell off here,

at least in the immediate reaction, down about 8%. But we hope to get a little bit more when we hear from the executives on the call and speak with the CEO later. All right. We're looking forward to that. Courtney Reagan, thank you. Let's get a look at Snowflake and Salesforce. Those shares moving in opposite directions, big moves in opposite directions. After Salesforce revenue and revenue guidance came in lower than expected, Snowflake shares, those are up thanks to a huge earnings beat. Joining us now is Brent Thill from Jefferies. He has a buy rating on both names. And Brent, I'm going to start by kicking it off with Snowflake, which is up about 11 percent right now because you had a big beat on top and bottom line. It

looks like Q4 product revenue was better than expected as well. And then, of course, they've announced this expanded partnership with Microsoft to add access to OpenAI. How does it now position Snowflake, especially given the fact that coming into this report, there was still a lot of question marks about valuation and whether they can continue to keep growing? Yeah, it was a good report. The guidance is the most important. There were a fear that they were going to guide the low 20s. They guided to 24, 8% margin. This is the single biggest operating margin expansion story in large cap software. The margins at 8 should be 30 over the next few years.

They are an AI play. They're an infrastructure play. They're embedded in many of the top AI companies, helping them make better decisions about who their customers are. So we think Sridhar, the new CEO who came in a year ago, has made a big impact on product. And they were lagging against their competitor, Databricks. They've improved their product quality. They've improved their execution. Last year was a really tough year. And we said in our playbook that in 2025, Snowflake's our recovery story that we think is on a better trajectory and we think uh the results further confirm uh that they're on this trajectory path

okay um if you like data and you like ai uh this is a good story it does not trade it palantir's lofty multiple it's still an expensive multiple but we think they're still upside in the multiple okay and uh we we think again uh there there, there's still a lot of upside ahead. What about Salesforce, then? I think you've got to buy on that pretty healthy price target above where it's trading right now. Stephanie Link just made the case, hey, based on the way revenue is growing, based on these results, it might be tough for it to justify that. Anything in this report give you pause? Yeah, I mean, again, I think single-digit growth, the streets hoping they can get back to

double-digit growth with AI and agent force. Remember, they just hired Robin as a CFO, and anytime a new CFO comes in, we think the guidance is going to be conservative. It makes sense. We think, again, agent force is super early. Their days of AI are only months in. They launched this product at the end of October. So it's only a few months in, and that's only going to build. So we think, again, this result wasn't phenomenal. Snowflake was way better. And many investors were already positioned long Salesforce. So the element of surprise wasn't here that the numbers were fine. They weren't they weren't great. OK, there's a little bit of margin improvement, but again, nothing, nothing too exciting. No big fireworks. All right. We'll

leave it there, Brent. Phil, thank you. When we come back, will NVIDIA's earnings calm the fears in the market or add fuel to the fire those crucial results are coming up next welcome back to overtime we are moments away from nvidia earnings let's bring back our panel paul hickey of bespoke investment group high tower chief investment strategist and cnbc contributor stephanie link patrick moore head of more insights and strategy and cnbc senior markets and CNBC Senior Markets Commentator Mike Santoli. Mike, NVIDIA, such a unique story, up around a little better than 65% over the last 12 months and a market cap over $3 trillion. I guess it's fair to have questions about what could stop the strength

of something moving that fast that's that big? Well, and actually within that, so for nine of the last 12 months, the stock hasn't made a whole lot of net progress. So you obviously have, I think, a lot of sort of balanced two-way discussion around this stock, not just that it's growing so phenomenally and is in the exact right spot in this industry, but what do you pay for it and how long is it going to last? I just want to mention... 50% growth on a $100 billion revenue company.

It's rare if it's been precedent at all. The results have crossed and we are taking a look at them. We'll get them to you as quickly as we can. It dipped quickly into the red and now it's a little bit in the green. It's going to be a while, so got to hang in there for more information. Can't react too much off of just the tape.

Paul, what are you most curious about in this report? Of course, hold on, we're ready with the numbers. Christina Partsenevelis has them. Christina. I'll just start with the top and bottom line. We're seeing 89 cents adjusted for earnings per share. That is 5 cents higher than what the street anticipated, up 82 percent from a year ago. So it is decelerating, but still higher

on revenues of a thirty nine point three billion dollars. That is higher than the street anticipated. And I'm also seeing data center revenue coming in at thirty five point six billion. The street was anticipating thirty three. So also a slight beat. We'll get back to you with the guidance. All right. Christina Parts novelist, thank you. Still combing through that result. Stephanie Link, want to get your reaction to this with a beat on the top and bottom lines. And it looks like data center revenue beat as well in the stock, spiking about three and a half percent right now. Well, revenue beat. That was good. I think there was expectation that revenue was going to be so obviously very positive. But data center, I think, is all driven by the data center. When you have the street that was looking for $34.1 billion, that would be up 11% sequentially,

and the number was better than expected at 35.6. That's up 12% sequentially. That should be good, good enough. But I think at the end of the day, we just have to hear the conference call. I think this is the most anticipated conference call of the season, of the earnings season, because we want to hear more details about DeepSeek. We want to hear more about Blackwell and the capacity supply issues and that sort of thing. And then, of course, I want to hear what they have to say about the data center build out in general from Microsoft to Meta to all the big names where all the CapEx is going. So I think we have to wait for the call, unfortunately. But the numbers look good to me. Yeah. And even beyond the call, of course, Jensen Wong is going to be with us on CNBC after he talks to analysts for even more detail. Pat

Moorhead, no big surprises here. It looks like beats pretty much across the board. But we have to dig more into the margins. And of course, you want to hear about Blackwell, right? That's absolutely right. You know, I did expect a double beat and maybe that wasn't too hard to figure out, but I know there are a lot of bears out there that question about. Everything that I want to know is in the CFO commentary and on the call, right? We need to understand details about the Blackwell rollout, supply chain clarity. I would love for Jensen to come out and be very direct on DeepSeek. I've been on your show before saying DeepSeek is actually an opportunity for NVIDIA. I want him to reiterate that with investors and then anything else right anything that's

incongruent with what the mag 7 said about their 325 billion dollar capex this is a stock that's looking for anything that is off kilter in their belief system i I do believe that the Mag 7 CapEx is built in, but with a slight curve, I think NVIDIA, it's really about a belief beyond 2025 and into 26 and 27. It looks like we've got some pretty bullish commentary from Jensen Wong in the release as well. And we're going to go back to Christina Parts Nevels right now for more from these results. Christina. Well, just to your point, that bullish commentary, he said, quote, we've successfully ramped up the massive scale production of Blackwell AI supercomputers. There's concern about the ramp and any delays. We'll get more from the CFO commentary. But I'd like to point

out, though, for Q1 revenue guidance, that's coming in at $43 billion. That is higher than the street anticipated. Keep in mind, NVIDIA only guides one quarter at a time. But the non-gap Q1 gross margins, that's coming down 71%. So it was 73.5 in Q4. Now it's going to be 71 in Q1. The street was anticipating 72. So that could have been why you saw a little bit of the stock dip right immediately after earnings. Management did warn it would go down and then come back up in the second half of the year around 75 percent. Guys. All right, Christina, thank you. Paul,

we were talking about it earlier in the show, the possibility of a triple play for NVIDIA. It looks like we got that here. But to Christina's point, maybe the non-gap gross margin guidance hindering it a little bit. Yeah, that's a little bit low, but as she said, they're forecasting a pickup in the second half. So that would be a good thing. I think more important than the conference call is going to be the interview at seven o'clock with John, because hopefully John can flesh out more details on more than a quarter ahead as far as guidance is concerned. But I think the reaction here is the stock's up a little bit. What we've seen with NVIDIA since last summer is multiple rallies ending on a

positive day and then an intraday reversal indicating investors selling into strength. So I think the real key that I'll be watching is tomorrow. How does that stock react? Do we see strength? Or if we do see strength in the morning, does it immediately get sold off? And if it does, that'll just tell us that the stock continues to be in a distribution mode rather than under accumulation. Well, if anybody can extract information, that's going to matter to the markets. It's John Ford. Well, thank you, Morgan. Paul, I will do my best. Pat, it's wild to me that we're talking about gross margins in the 70s as being a little low. How much, put it into context for what semiconductor margins usually are,

how much do we have to expect that during the ramp of a new product there will be some fluctuation? I mean, listen, anything in the 70s is outstanding. And the fact that we're nitpicking over a few percents, and yes, I know it makes a difference, is very interesting to me. I've shipped a lot of products in my prior life. And I will tell you that when you are working as hard as you can to get products out, you typically will spend more to make that happen. So there's likely some accelerated ordering of things that NVIDIA needs to do to get Blackwell ready. And remember, this is not just shipping some cards out. NVIDIA is shipping rack scale system that includes

not only cards and chips from networking and GPUs and CPUs, but also cabling and the racks themselves. So accelerating, I think the street much rather see a beat in the forecast and more confidence around Blackwell as long as the margins don't get too out of hand. And I'm not saying a few points doesn't matter. It does. But if the story that comes out on the call is that, investors should be happy that they are where they are. And industry-leading margins, again, I'll reiterate, are in the 70s.

Mike, I want to get your thoughts on this, especially since coming into this print, NVIDIA was down something like 7% since the last earnings report, down 17% from the January high that we saw early in that month. We know the AI trade, the tech trade, perked up a little bit in the market today. But in general, we've seen quite a rotation. We've seen a lot of profit taking. Your takeaway from the results we've gotten so far and how it speaks to this broader ecosystem? Yeah, I think, Morgan, the market has been keeping the AI theme on a shorter leash. I don't think it's ever going to lengthen back out to where it was a year ago, meaning that everybody involved, the spenders and the vendors were all benefiting and getting massive valuation premiums because

it was just a huge bonanza. These results from NVIDIA, as good as they are in absolute terms, they show this company is beyond the point of being able to dazzle and outpace even people's imagination. Forty two billion in the current quarter guidance for revenue plus or minus two percent is a rounding error versus the consensus. It's a good, you know, reaffirmation of the trend. And I think that we've kind of gotten this funny game. I saw some soul side commentary saying, well, they're probably going to beat top line by one point eight billion, but they're going to get back to their two billion dollar quarterly beat rate after, you know, after this. Well, why just raise your estimates if you think that's what it's going to be?

But I think it's kind of funny that we're at this point where expectations are pretty well in balance. The stock is pretty well in balance. A lot of people burned a lot of option premium betting on a massive move. We might get it over the next two days, but it's just fascinating that we've almost reached a state of maturity in this theme where the company is delivering, but no longer just completely wowing everybody with the magnitude of it. Yes, Stephanie, I wonder what you make of that. Mike mentions the options. It gives you the visual of a coiled spring could move 10 percent one way or the other. But it's not doing that yet. We're only 10 minutes into the overtime trade. And I just don't think if you're bullish on this name and you own this name, you're going to sell

it on this news. I mean, I think the quarter was actually quite good, as mentioned. Data center revenues. This is why you own this company. Right. And data centers to to grow 12 percent sequentially. That is really, for a company of this size, that's really amazing. We all knew about the margins. We were all kind of bracing for 71, 72% margin and guidance to be for margins flat. And the ramp from Blackwell in the second half of the year will get them higher margins. That's exactly what they're telling you. So you have better revenue. You have margins going higher. You got operating leverage on the bottom line. And by the way, it's one of the cheaper names in the kind of the data center world. If you think about 33 times and you think

about 75, 78 times for ARM and 38 times for Marvell, even a Broadcom, which I own, is at 34 times. So it's gotten a little bit cheaper and they're still delivering. I think this is still a good story for the long haul. We want to get back to Christina Parts Nevelis with more on this report. Christina. Yeah. Well, speaking of delivering, $11 billion of Blackwell in Q4. That's what they're saying in the CFO remarks from Colette Kress.

So that's $11 billion of Blackwell happening and delivered in Q4. That's the fastest ramp that they've seen. So go towards Steph's point that they could continue to ramp up in the second half of this year. I'd like to point out they break it down into categories. We talked about data center because that's over 80 percent of revenues. But gaming was a concern. GPU gaming or gaming GPUs have come down in price. We're seeing that a little bit weaker than what the street anticipated at 2.5 versus the 3 billion anticipated. And also professional visualization in other categories is much smaller. But gaming is one that just stood out.

Back with you guys. All right, Christina, thank you. And the stock is bouncing around between gains and losses, but basically hovering around the flat line. So, Paul, Stephanie, Patrick, and Mike, thank you all for breaking down this report initially with us. What a report, right? And still a lot more to go looking through it. Yeah. Well, after the break, that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to talk to a bullish analyst about NVIDIA's results and what he wants to hear from CEO Jensen Huang on the earnings call. And venture capitalist Byron Dieter is going to break down what NVIDIA's report says about the broader AI ecosystem. Over time,

we'll be right back. We've got a lot more NVIDIA earnings coming up. But first, another company in the semiconductor ecosystem, but on the software side, Synopsys earnings are out. Seema Modi has the numbers. Seema. Yeah, software company that services the semiconductor sector out with a sizable beat on its bottom line, John, for the first quarter, $3.03 versus the estimate of $2.84 adjusted revenue. A slight miss, but $1.46 billion. And the CEO talking about how they're continuing to see strong design activity at advanced nodes fueled by the artificial intelligence-driven reinvention of compute. So

a positive read here on the chip sector with a stock you'll see up nearly 2% in overtime, John. All right, Seema, thanks. And we're going to hear more from Synopsys CEO Sassin Ghazi tomorrow, 4 p.m., right here on Overtime. Now let's check in on some other earnings movers. Nutanix is higher by almost 10% after a solid beat on earnings and revenue, also giving strong third quarter revenue guidance. Meantime, sweet green shares are sinking. The solid chain reporting a wider than expected loss per share, missing on revenue and giving light full year guidance. And Ambarella is jumping after reporting earnings of 11 cents per share

versus estimates of a loss of 2 cents. That's higher by almost 12 percent. Well, let's get another check on NVIDIA as well, because joining us right now is Angelo Zeno, CFRA senior equity analyst. He has a buy rating on NVIDIA. And last I checked with that stock chart up, it looked like maybe we were fractionally higher. No, we're down 1 percent now. Angelo, I want to get your initial take on these results we got, which were a beat for the quarter and also better than expected Q1 revenue guidance.

But those Q1 gross margins may be a little softer than expected. Stock has been moving between gains and losses. But $11 billion for Blackwell in Q4 tells us what? $11 billion is a really good number. I mean, we were kind of, you know, looking for kind of high single digits in terms of kind of like the $7 to $9 billion range for Blackwell. So $11 billion is definitely a good number out there. You would expect Blackwell to officially kind of cross over a hopper in terms of kind of the April quarter, especially with that guidance there, which kind of, You know at forty three billion I think is a is a pretty good number we were a little bit concerned

about what that guidance was going to look like. Especially as kind of you know given some of the- delays that were out there. Surrounding kind of the G. B. two hundred so I think as far as kind of the guidance is concerned here. I think you

have to be optimistic I think Blackwell at eleven billion is a good number and then. As far as that gross margin guidance is concerned it's a little bit disturbing but I think it also kind 11 billion is a good number. And then, you know, as far as that gross margin guidance is concerned, it's a little bit disturbing. But I think it also kind of points to the fact that, you know, the GB200 probably starts ramping here, you know, as we go into the April quarter. And that probably does weigh on the margins here and the hope. And you would think that they would articulate kind of, you know, a bounce back on the margin side of things over the

next kind of two to three quarters after the April quarter. What's the most impactful thing that Jensen can tell us about demand? Yeah, I mean, I think everybody kind of wants to know, you know, whether or not some of this stuff is sustainable out there. We kind of want to hear a commentary on kind of DeepSeek and his thoughts about DeepSeek, kind of the sustainability on the compute side of things over the next couple of quarters. So, you know, we kind of want to know kind of the sustainability on the compute side of things over the next couple of quarters. So, you know, we kind of want to know kind of how the Blackwell kind of trajectory plays itself out here, how those configurations kind of look, like how kind of, you know, some of their, you know, their kind of gray CPUs and what have you in terms of the configurations kind of look

like here. So we want to kind of see what that Blackwell momentum looks like, you know, post the April quarter, whether or not they provide any type of kind of commentary on that side of things remains to be seen but listen when you kind of look um from a broader perspective here i mean the hyperscalers have come out here 2025 looks pretty good the uncertainty now is going to be about what china does what the us does with china And you're not going to hear, I think, anything as far as a resolution on that side of things from what Junten Wang has to say about China. And then, of course, going into calendar 2026, that remains an unknown. We know the growth is going to decelerate from the current levels. But the question is, you know, how comfortable is the street kind of looking ahead?

Yeah, a lot of unpacking to do. Angela Zeno, thanks for joining us with NVIDIA Down Fractionally right now. Up next, venture capitalist Byron Dieter on what NVIDIA's results say about the outlook for investing in AI. And don't miss my interview with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. That's tonight's CNBC special report coming up 7 p.m. Eastern. And of course, you can watch it right here on CNBC. Welcome back to Overtime. NVIDIA shares just fractionally lower for something that this heavily watched and this heavily traded. That's something.

What does this result mean for AI demand overall, the broader ecosystem? Joining us now is Byron Dieter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Byron, NVIDIA had beats on the top and bottom. The guide was a beat. The margins, low 70s. I guess people can have a bone to pick with that. But a big question is demand and demand from the hyperscalers like Amazon. I asked Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about the demand for AI chips earlier today. Here's what he said. We have a lot of demand for AI right now and a lot of demand for our instances that have tranium chips, NVIDIA chips, AMD chips. And I would tell you that at this stage, and it could change, but at this stage, if we

had more capacity than we already have, and we have a lot, but if we had more capacity, we could monetize it. For NVIDIA, you're saying? For everything. For everything. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think, remember, I mean, there's really predominantly been one chip that people have used the first couple years of this revolution

around generative AI. I think over time, people are going to use lots of different chips, and how that mix changes, we'll have to see. But I have high confidence that training will be a chip that a lot of people use on top of our platform, in addition to NVIDIA. So Byron, is this about the competition between NVIDIA enhancing performance at one end and the hyperscalers trying to enhance the price performance at the other? And that determines where a stock like NVIDIA goes from here, you think? Great to be back with you, John. Thanks for having me on. And yes, I would break demand into two segments. The first is customer demand at the end pull through. That's insatiable. And what these results show is that the large model

providers, the application providers can't get enough of AI capable chips, and they're still being rate limited, which is almost inconceivable, you know, several quarters into this AI revolution. But the next level is the demand by the hyperscalers of what chips they're providing. So you can think of it as the supply side of the equation for the end customers as well. And that's going to be diversified here in the coming quarters. This 85% market share that NVIDIA has enjoyed is going to come down. And so the question is, does the market growth offset that so that everyone can grow and there'll be many, many winners?

Or does this start to erode NVIDIA's market position in the medium and long term? I think AMD and Amazon have played this beautifully. The Tranium chips are getting rave reviews early on. And there's going to be many providers, add in Google and AMD and many pure plays in this mix as well. And this landscape is going to get much more competitive by the back half of this year and into early next year that will provide a lot more supply capabilities for these hyperscalers and for the end consumers. So, Byron, what's the takeaway for so many other companies in the ecosystem, including software stocks? It seems to me, Andy Jassy saying that demand is pretty strong. These numbers from NVIDIA seem to indicate that right now the demand is pretty strong. That ought to bode well for some companies, no? I think on many levels. NVIDIA in the short to medium term continues to

deliver near perfection. It's an exceptional company and they've got a backlog of demand that they're still racing to fulfill. It also shows that a number of these companies on the application layer are starting to get real monetization and they're reaccelerating growth. And there's going to be some tradable opportunities there as they inject AI into their applications. End user benefits start to take hold and they're going to start to monetize. And so I think we're going to start to see some separation of the application leaders. And then I think we're going to start to see some more beneficiaries in the chip market in what's been a borderline monopoly market for the last many quarters. And that will start to have more beneficiaries and some more tradable signals there as well.

So, I mean, when I hear you talk about that in the public markets for the better part of two years, I would argue there's been some exuberance around the AI trade, particularly the so-called picks and shovels, NVIDIA kind of being the poster child, even some of the AI infrastructure names. Those have been coming off in recent days and recent weeks in public markets. You've seen some pretty big moves to the downside. If you're investing right now to see greater returns in the future, do you invest in the application layer? What's the next piece of this where you could see those winners and losers emerge more meaningfully? Well, the biggest pure plays in AI are still in the private markets. That's the open AIs, the anthropics, even the data bricks of the world who are huge beneficiaries here. That's the

next wave that people are waiting to go public. And those are still several quarters out. And so what people are trying to do is get pieces of the AI trade and get a little AI pixie dust on stocks. And you'll start to see some of the beneficiaries there. Obviously, Snowflake has moved a lot around it. Salesforce is racing to make agent force part of their offering and has some real possible tailwinds if they can cannibalize their own core markets with these disruptive tech. But what we're looking for on the private markets is these pure plays that are going to be the disruptors. And I think that's what public market investors are most excited for is the second half of this year and going into early next year as some of these companies start to cross over and can really be disruptive for the legacy providers of software. I don't know if you've been on since we've seen this whole deep seek shakeout in the public markets, but it's going to be in focus again when Jensen Huang gets on the call tonight and then speaks to John after that.

So I just want to get your thoughts on that as we do seem to be seeing those costs of compute coming down right now. So I think it's been overblown in terms of what was misperceived as a possible demand shock, meaning the pull-through from hyperscalers is suddenly the efficiency curve is two orders of magnitude out of whack for the large language model providers. That's just wrong. DeepSeq is another flavor. It was based off of a lot of prior work. There was distillation attacks, all sorts of things that enabled this fundamentally efficiencies will continue to roll through from the software side but the compute demands are insatiable these foundation models are continuing to push against AGI they are scaling up their training and now the inference loads are

starting to come online in production use cases and I don't see any pullback in raw compute demand in even the medium term and it's really just production use cases. And I don't see any pullback in raw compute demand in even the medium term. And it's really just more use cases. And it's lighter weight models, cheaper models, you know, small models come online. People are going to plug those into different use cases and unlock new use cases that weren't available at the higher token costs and the higher compute intensity levels. And that's just going to unlock more use cases and even more demand as you come down that curve. All right. Byron Dieter, thanks for helping us understand the broader landscape. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Up next, Mike Santoli digs into NVIDIA's valuation as we

count down to its call with analysts at the top of the hour. And taser maker and body camera maker Axon, the big winner in the S&P 500, following an earnings beat and better than expected full year forecast, thanks in part to strong international orders. This has been another AI play in of itself. Stay with us. Welcome back to Overtime. Let's bring back Mike Santoli for a look at NVIDIA's valuation on the back of those fourth quarter earnings results.

Mike? Yeah, John, first take a look at how NVIDIA has traded relative to Tesla on a one-year basis. On any given day, these are by far the most heavily traded two stocks on dollar value. And you can see they've traded places in terms of one accelerating past the other a couple of times this year. Obviously, Tesla's deep retreat has taken it below on a one-year basis. On a three-year, by the way, Tesla's about flat, NVIDIA up 400-some percent. Take a look here, too, against Apple.

NVIDIA and Apple, also some synchronicity here. This is since July 10th, which was the absolute peak of relative outperformance by Mag7 and NVIDIA both. That was really the crescendo of that kind of a trade. And you see since then, Apple very stable, just slightly outperforming NVIDIA. But they've kind of just consolidated here for some time. Now, the valuation of these two stocks as well have also come together.

And now you see this way that NVIDIA's forward PE has just bucked all over the place. Well, that was because, you know, the stock would surge and then forward earnings estimates would go up so much that it would compress the PE. And that's happened a few times now. It sort of settled into more of a somewhat normal range. Thirty times earnings is where a lot of the big Nasdaq stocks do trade right now. And Nvidia got there by slowing its pace of revenue growth from, let's say, 100 percent the last two years to 50 percent this year to 25 next year. And the question is, how durable is that going to be for Apple? They've added the services component and become more stable. That's how Apple mostly got this premium valuation. Different stages for two different giants. Mike Santoli, thank you.

Well, we are a single digit minutes away from NVIDIA's analyst call. Up next, some of the other earnings movers you need to know about. And don't forget, you can catch us on the go by following the Closing Bell Overtime podcast on your favorite podcast app. We will be right back. Welcome back. We've got some more big earnings movers to bring you. Shares of cashback rewards company Ibotta are plunging after revenue missed expectations. First quarter revenue guidance was soft as well. Those shares are down more than 31 percent. Teladoc shares are pulling back as well after a mixed quarter, reporting a wider-than-expected loss per share.

And matching revenue estimates, those shares are down about 10%. Pure Storage, that's lower despite a beat on the top and bottom lines as well, also down about 11.5%. And, of course, don't miss tonight's CNBC special report on NVIDIA earnings with my one-on-one interview with CEO Jensen Wong. It's coming up 7 p.m. Eastern just after the analyst call. Morgan, I'll also mention Nutanix, another software company operating in data centers, up 13 percent. Some interesting results there.

And across the board, you know, Snowflake, another name that got this deal with Microsoft, as well as results that beat the street. It all speaks to demand for data center transformation, AI being a part of that, staying strong, which echoes the sound that we just played for you there of Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, talking about, hey, if they had more AI infrastructure, they could sell it. Yeah, I mean, $11 billion in revenue in Q4 for Blackwell certainly bodes well. And we did get some bullish commentary from Jensen Huang in the release. So what he has to say on the call in the next couple of minutes, then what he has to say with you at 7 p.m. Eastern is going to matter here, too, with the stock now up about 2.5%. You were mentioning Salesforce coming off the lows. NVIDIA has as well. NVIDIA now trading up more than two and a half percent. Yes, that's right. And Salesforce

down just about one and a half percent. Agentic AI, of course, is going to be a big theme on that call as well. It'll be interesting to hear what they have to say as they do look to reaccelerate top line growth at that company too. Meantime, you had the major averages claw back their losses from the middle of the day as well, although we're on pace for losses for the month. And we haven't really talked about it. The 10-year Treasury yield has dropped pretty dramatically over the past week. It has, whether you're talking about the major averages or some major stocks. Investors are just trying to figure out which way these things are going to push.

That's why you've got to watch CNBC. Benny Offon and Jensen as well. That's right. And that AI trade, what happens next? That does it for us here at Overtime.