Nvidia, the reigning monarch of the chip kingdom, has once again captured Wall Street’s attention with a dazzling earnings report. Just when you thought the artificial intelligence hype train couldn’t pick up more speed, it barrels into the station with Nvidia’s latest figures, leaving analysts clutching their pearls and investors riding high.

The chipmaker revealed its earnings after hours on Wednesday, and the numbers blew past what Wall Street had hoped for, sending shares up by 2% in after-hours trading. But let’s not pretend the excitement comes without some shade; behind the scenes, whispers of competition from DeepSeek, a bold newcomer from China, are causing Nvidia’s once-untouchable market value to wobble.

Speaking of which, Nvidia’s market cap reached an eye-popping $3.215 trillion before this earnings splash. This puts it just shy of Apple’s $3.611 trillion, as Microsoft brings up the rear with less than $3 trillion. Just two years ago, the chip giant was riding below $600 billion. Talk about a glow-up!

But hold your horses, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. After DeepSeek’s shocking announcement that it had developed its own large language model competing directly with NVIDIA, the tech titan saw its stock drop 17% in a single day. The AI ecosystem, once thought to be an impenetrable fortress built on Nvidia’s silicon, has now been thrown into turmoil. The future felt a lot less certain but, in classic Wall Street fashion, that didn’t stop NVIDIA from raking in a stunning $39.33 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, a whopping 78% increase from last year.

In the whole fiscal year ending January 2025, NVIDIA not only doubled its revenue from the previous year but also more than quadrupled it from two years ago, totaling $130.5 billion. If you’re counting, NVIDIA accounted for 22% of the S&P 500’s gains last year, while Amazon barely scraped together 6%. It’s safe to say NVIDIA is a pretty big deal.

For a little fun with statistics, Nvidia’s market cap could buy around 649 billion dozen eggs at the current average price. That’s a lot of omelets, assuming we can find any, given those pesky bird flu outbreaks.

So, while NVIDIA struts its stuff in earnings glory, it also stands at a crossroads, cautiously eyeing formidable challengers. With ongoing fluctuations in the chip landscape, the showdown between giants is only just getting started.