Honestly, if you spent 2024 thinking the AI bubble was about to pop, 2025 probably felt like a personal attack. I get it. The skepticism was everywhere. But looking back at the NVIDIA financial news 2025 cycle, it’s clear we weren't just watching a stock climb; we were watching the literal plumbing of the global economy get ripped out and replaced.
It wasn’t a smooth ride, though. Far from it.
The $4 Trillion Milestone and the "Circular Deal" Drama
By July 2025, NVIDIA did the unthinkable. It became the most valuable company in the world, crossing a $4 trillion market cap. Briefly, it even touched $5 trillion in October. That is a stupid amount of money. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire GDP of most industrialized nations.
But the "whisper network" on Wall Street wasn't just celebrating. Around September, everyone started freaking out about "circular deals." You might have seen the headlines. NVIDIA and OpenAI announced a massive strategic partnership, which led to a ton of finger-pointing. Critics, and even some nervous institutional investors, started asking: "Is NVIDIA just funding its own customers so they can buy NVIDIA chips?"
It’s a fair question. When a company is growing at 114% year-over-year—which NVIDIA did for the full fiscal year 2025, hitting $130.5 billion in revenue—people look for the catch.
Breaking Down the Numbers (The Real Ones)
If you look at the Q4 fiscal 2025 report released in February, the numbers were basically a fever dream.
- Total Revenue: $39.3 billion (up 78% from the previous year).
- Data Center Revenue: $35.6 billion. This is the heart of the beast.
- Gross Margin: Around 73-75%.
The data center growth was fueled by the "AI factory" concept Jensen Huang kept talking about. It’s not just about selling a chip anymore; it's about these massive Blackwell AI supercomputers. They started shipping Blackwell in high volume in early 2025, and it basically sold out instantly.
We’re talking billions in sales in the first quarter of production alone.
Why the "DeepSeek" Shock Actually Mattered
In January 2025, a massive curveball came out of China: DeepSeek. This wasn't just another model. They claimed their "algorithm equality" could slash inference costs to below 10% of what Silicon Valley was spending.
For a minute, NVIDIA’s stock actually shook. People thought, "Wait, if algorithms get that much more efficient, do we need fewer chips?"
The market eventually decided the answer was "No." Instead of buying fewer chips, companies just realized they could do ten times more work for the same price. It shifted the valuation logic from just "how many H100s do you have?" to "how efficient is your entire stack?" This is when we saw Google start to claw back some territory with its TPU chips, creating a sort of "Google + NVIDIA" duopoly by the end of the year.
The Stargate Project and the $500 Billion Bet
You can't talk about NVIDIA financial news 2025 without mentioning the Stargate Project. This $500 billion private-sector initiative was a massive tailwind. NVIDIA was named the key technology partner.
Think about that number for a second. $500 billion.
While the Gaming division actually saw some dips—Q4 gaming revenue was down about 22% compared to the previous quarter—nobody really cared. When your data center business is growing by 142% annually, a slow quarter for GeForce RTX cards is barely a rounding error on the balance sheet.
The Elephant in the Room: Tariffs and the China Write-off
It wasn't all record highs and champagne. The geopolitical situation in 2025 was, frankly, a mess. The Trump administration's moves to restrict sales to China forced NVIDIA to take a $4.5 billion write-off in the first quarter of the year.
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That hurt.
Then you had the "Liberation Day" tariff announcements in April. The whole market corrected. NVIDIA wasn't immune. But while Intel was out there struggling to keep the lights on, NVIDIA’s "repair power"—as some analysts called it—was insane. Every time the stock dipped on macro news, it seemed to bounce back higher within a month because the demand for AI infrastructure was just too decoupled from the rest of the economy.
Automotive and Robotics: The "Hidden" Growth
While everyone was staring at LLMs, NVIDIA’s Automotive and Robotics segment quietly exploded.
- Q4 Automotive revenue: $570 million.
- Year-over-year growth: 103%.
It’s still small compared to the $115 billion Data Center behemoth, but it’s the segment to watch for 2026. They are moving into "Physical AI"—stuff that actually moves in the real world, not just chatbots.
What This Means for Your Portfolio Right Now
If you're looking at NVIDIA now, you have to stop thinking of it as a "chip company." That's the old way of looking at it. In 2025, they became a platform company.
Watch the Margins, Not Just the Revenue
NVIDIA's margins started to face a little pressure toward the end of 2025. They’re still legendary (mid-70s), but as they ramp up Blackwell and move toward the next architecture, the cost of manufacturing is getting astronomical. If those margins start dipping into the 60s, the "infinite growth" narrative might finally hit a wall.
The "Sovereign AI" Trend
One of the biggest takeaways from the 2025 reports was the rise of "Sovereign AI." Countries like Vietnam (where NVIDIA opened its first R&D center in 2025) and various European nations are now building their own domestic AI clusters. They don't want to rely on US cloud providers. This creates a whole new category of buyers that didn't exist two years ago.
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Don't Ignore the "Circular Deal" Risk
Keep an eye on the SEC filings regarding partnerships with major AI labs. If it turns out a significant chunk of revenue is being "recycled" through investments, the 2026 correction could be much harsher than the minor dips we saw in 2025.
Actionable Next Steps
- Audit your tech exposure: If you own the S&P 500, you are heavily exposed to NVIDIA whether you like it or not. Check your concentration levels.
- Follow the "Physical AI" breadcrumbs: Look at NVIDIA's partnerships in healthcare (like the Siemens Healthineers deal) and robotics. That’s where the next 100% growth cycle will come from.
- Monitor the 10-year Treasury yield: As it ended 2025 around 4.17%, any spike in 2026 will hit high-valuation tech stocks first.
NVIDIA basically ate the world in 2025. The question for 2026 isn't whether they’ll stay relevant, but whether the rest of the economy can actually keep up with the speed they're moving at.