Nvidia Blasts Past Expectations and Pulls Wall Street Out of Its Slump

By Kristoff De Turck - reviewed by Aldwin Keppens

Last update: Nov 20, 2025

A Much-Needed Rebound After a Rough Stretch

After four days of declines, equities closed broadly higher as traders digested new Fed minutes and positioned themselves ahead of Nvidia’s earnings report, the one catalyst simply too big to ignore.

The Fed minutes didn’t offer much comfort. Policymakers remained divided about a potential December rate cut, with opponents clearly in the driver’s seat. Markets heard the message: the odds of a cut slipped from 50% to roughly one-third. So much for that early-season optimism.

There was another curveball: the October jobs report - already delayed by the government shutdown - will now come after the next Fed meeting, and even then it will be incomplete. Hardly ideal for a central bank supposedly “data-driven.”

The dollar strengthened, the euro ticked down to 1.1526, and oil fell 2% on fresh oversupply worries despite declining U.S. inventories. Crypto traders had a tougher day: Bitcoin slid 3.5% and dipped back under the $90,000 mark.

Nvidia’s Earnings: “AI Bubble? Not So Much.”

If Nvidia (NVDA | + 2.85%, +5% after hours) wanted to silence critics calling the AI trade overstretched, it did so with a blowtorch.

For Q3, revenue hit $57 billion (+62% YoY), beating the $55.2 billion expected. The data-center segment - the company’s true crown jewel - jumped to $51.2 billion, also above estimates. EPS landed at $1.32, topping forecasts.

Guidance for Q4? Even better: $63.7 to $66.3 billion versus a consensus of $62 billion. That sound you heard was every AI skeptic choking on their coffee.

CEO Jensen Huang, never one for modesty, said demand for Blackwell chips is “through the roof.” Clouds and accelerators are effectively sold out. And that supposed AI bubble? Huang sees the opposite, exponential growth in reasoning models, inference workloads, physical AI applications, and more.

A few highlights from the call:

Pre-training, post-training, and inference workloads are all growing rapidly.
Nvidia’s inference leadership is widening thanks to Blackwell and NVLink72.
Data-center influence keeps expanding through high-margin networking, switches, and interconnects.

CFO Colette Kress expects the fiscal year to end with a near-75% gross margin, unthinkable for most hardware companies, but Nvidia is not “most hardware companies.”

AI Stocks Surge After Hours

NVDA’s beat sent shockwaves through the broader AI complex.

CoreWeave jumped 9% after hours, Nebius surged more than 8%, and rivals AMD (AMD | +4% after-hours) and Intel (INTC | +2.3% after-hours) shot higher as well.

The AI rally - looking increasingly wobbly over the past weeks - suddenly found new life. When Nvidia booms, the entire AI universe inhales oxygen.

Company Highlights: M&A Pops, Retail Divergence, and Nuclear Revival

One of the biggest surprise moves came from Semrush Holdings (SEMR | +73.96%), after Adobe (ADBE | –1.96%) announced it would acquire the digital marketing platform for $12 a share in a $1.9 billion deal. The premium was impossible to ignore, investors love a good takeover, especially in a soft tape.

Lowe’s (LOW | +4.03%) delivered earnings and revenue comfortably above expectations, giving the stock a much-needed boost one day after its peer Home Depot (HD | –0.59%) disappointed.

Target (TGT | –2.77%) didn’t share Lowe’s good fortune, cutting its profit outlook as the new CEO Michael Fiddelke gets a bruising welcome.

Constellation Energy (CEG | +5.34%) also had a standout session as the U.S. government granted the company a $1 billion loan to restart the historical Three Mile Island nuclear plant.

Constellation already provides one-quarter of the nation’s nuclear power output and supplies AI-intensive customers like Microsoft and Meta. In a world starving for power-hungry computing, nuclear suddenly looks like a growth story again.

La-Z-Boy (LZB | +20.21%) rounded out the day with monster gains after smashing earnings expectations. Apparently, recliners still sell, especially when investors least expect it.

Alphabet Breaks Records as Gemini 3 Ignites AI Optimism

While Nvidia was gearing up for its fireworks, Alphabet (GOOGL | +2.82%) quietly delivered its own showstopper.

The stock surged to a fresh record close near $293 after briefly crossing the $300 barrier for the first time, bringing that once-fantastical $4 trillion market cap squarely into view. The spark? The launch of Gemini 3, which CEO Sundar Pichai boldly called “the best AI model in the industry.”

Analysts agreed. Evercore ISI praised Alphabet as “an extraordinary innovation machine,” while Bloomberg Intelligence highlighted Google’s unmatched training and inference scale, powered by its in-house TPU chips.

Unlike general-purpose Nvidia GPUs, these TPUs are optimized for specific AI workloads, allowing Alphabet to run models more efficiently and at lower cost. That efficiency edge could give Google Cloud a meaningful pricing advantage over Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Alphabet is up nearly 6% this week and a staggering 60% year-to-date, its strongest performance ever among the Magnificent Seven. Even Jim Cramer publicly regretted selling the stock. With fresh momentum, a major legal win on antitrust grounds, and a rapidly scaling AI ecosystem, Alphabet isn’t just thriving, it’s accelerating.

Macro Backdrop: A Market Searching for Direction

Yes, stocks closed higher, but the landscape remains mixed:

The Fed heads into its next meeting with unreliable employment data.
Global geopolitical tensions persist.
Energy markets remain volatile.
Currency movements underscore lingering investor uncertainty.

But for now, Nvidia’s blowout quarter overshadowed everything else. The market needed a win and it got one.

Final Thoughts

The takeaway?

Investors may not know what the Fed will do in December, but they’re growing increasingly confident about something else: AI isn’t slowing down.

Nvidia blew the doors off expectations, Alphabet stormed to new all-time highs, and the market finally found a dose of optimism. On a day that started gloomy, AI once again lit the path forward.

Kristoff - ChartMill

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