Nvidia accounts above estimates launch technology, Milan runs St

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) - A banner session for technology stocks and, in particular, for those in the semiconductor sector, which benefited from the above-expected quarterly report of US giant Nvidia (+4.8% in premarket trading on Wall Street). Thus, while the sector's Euro Stoxx 600 was up 1.44%, among the best performances of the European sector indices, at Piazza Affari Stmicroelectronics topped the FTSE MIB , with a rise of more than four points. For St. St. also made similar gains in Paris, while in Frankfurt Infineon (+3.69%) ran. In Amsterdam, Asml (+3.9 per cent), Asm International (+4.87 per cent) and Be Semiconductor (+4.5 per cent) were in the lead.

Driving the industry is Nvidia, which once again exceeded expectations for its quarterly results (first period of fiscal 2026), thanks mainly to a lower-than-expected impact of US tariffs on exports of its chips to China. However, CEO Jensen Huang, speaking to analysts during the results commentary call, said that the Chinese market is too big and now too far ahead on technology research to think about isolating it, as US President Trump would like to do. "Chinese competitors are really formidable, they are doubling or quadrupling their computational power every year. And that is a problem, especially because the Chinese market is effectively closed to American industry,' Huang said.

In fact, the restrictions, which were eventually lifted in mid-May by the Trump administration, still hurt the Santa Clara-based group to some extent: due to the restrictions imposed on the export of H20 chips to the Chinese market, the company recorded an extraordinary charge of USD 4.5 billion associated with excess inventories and a drop in demand for these products. Sales of H20 chips were $4.6 billion in the first quarter before the new export licence requirements were introduced, but would have been $2.5 billion higher without the restrictions.

However, revenues of $44.1 billion were higher than the consensus-expected $43.31 billion, up 12% from the previous quarter and 69% from a year earlier, earnings beat estimates, and the company reported that, compared to the previous quarter, progress was made mainly in four areas: data centres (Q1 revenues +10% quarter-on-quarter and +73% year-on-year to EUR39.1bn), gaming (revenues of EUR3.8bn, +48% quarter-on-quarter and +42% year-on-year), professional visualisation (revenues of EUR509m, unchanged quarter-on-quarter and +19% year-on-year) and automotive & robotics (EUR567m, -1% quarter-on-quarter but +72% year-on-year). According to Equita's analysts, 'overall, these are positive indications for the entire artificial intelligence ecosystem. Demand remains strong and increasingly diversified, and even after the advent of DeepSeek, fears seem to be subsiding as a scenario is taking shape in which lower inference costs further accelerate large-scale adoption'.