Nvidia crushed Wall Street expectations with its first-quarter earnings report Thursday, posting revenue of $81.62 billion — well above the $79.19 billion analysts had penciled in. Adjusted earnings per share hit $1.87, also beating forecasts. The news sent the AI-related crypto sector's market cap up 2% to $24.39 billion, a rare green tick in a choppy week for digital assets.
Record data center revenue
The company's data center division generated $75.2 billion in revenue, topping estimates of $73.48 billion. That's the bulk of Nvidia's business now, and it keeps growing. Demand for the Blackwell AI architecture accelerated sharply during the quarter, with hyperscalers and enterprise customers both buying at a record pace. Nvidia also introduced a new reporting structure that breaks out Data Center and Edge Computing platforms separately — a sign of how central those segments have become.
The AI crypto bump
The 2% rise in the AI crypto market cap isn't huge, but it's notable given how tightly that niche tracks Nvidia's fortunes. Many AI-focused crypto projects rely on Nvidia GPUs for compute, so a strong earnings beat tends to lift sentiment across the board. The gain came even as broader crypto markets stayed mostly flat, suggesting money rotated specifically into AI tokens on the Nvidia news.
Bellwether status
Analyst Daniela Hathorn called Nvidia the bellwether for the entire AI trade. She's not wrong. The company's outlook for the current quarter is even more optimistic: Q2 revenue is expected between $89.18 billion and $92.82 billion, ahead of the Street's $87.36 billion estimate. That kind of momentum filters down to the projects building on Nvidia silicon.
Nvidia's new reporting structure will make it easier to track how much revenue comes from AI inference versus training, and from edge deployments versus cloud data centers. The next quarterly report, due in August, will be the first under that framework. For the AI crypto sector, the question is whether the Blackwell ramp can sustain the enthusiasm — or if the market has already priced in the good news.
