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The logo of Anthropic. / Reuters-Yonhap News Agency

U.S. artificial intelligence startup Anthropic and semiconductor giant Nvidia are fueling high earnings expectations on the back of the ongoing AI boom. Anthropic projected its first-ever quarterly operating profit for the second quarter, while Nvidia delivered stellar performance, with its net income more than tripling year-on-year.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on May 20, Anthropic shared its earnings guidance with investors, projecting second-quarter revenue to reach at least 10.9 billion dollars. This represents a 130 percent surge from the 4.8 billion dollars recorded in the previous quarter.

The company expects to post an operating profit of 559 million dollars, marking its first-ever turn toward profitability. The WSJ noted that if materialized, it would virtually mark the first profitable milestone in the generative AI sector, serving as a highly significant case of monetization.

This rapid growth trajectory has also sparked discussions that Anthropic could potentially surpass OpenAI in valuation during a future initial public offering (IPO).

The primary catalyst behind Anthropic's earnings surge is the expanding corporate demand for AI. The usage of its coding-specialized AI model, Claude, is growing rapidly among developers, while its recently unveiled model, Mythos, is gaining substantial traction in security vulnerability detection and code analysis.

On the same day, Nvidia reported its first-quarter earnings, with revenue soaring 85 percent year-on-year to 81.6 billion dollars and operating profit jumping 147 percent to 53.78 billion dollars.

Nvidia's robust performance was driven by a surge in data center GPU and networking revenues. Notably, its networking revenue tripled from the previous year to reach 14.8 billion dollars.

"The era of agentic AI has arrived, and demand is growing exponentially," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated during the earnings call.

Investors remain focused on the company's long-term growth sustainability and its market penetration in China. Although the U.S. government has approved the sale of Nvidia's H200 chips to China, clearance from Chinese regulatory authorities has been delayed. While this has yet to be reflected in actual revenues, Huang emphasized the market's potential, estimating China's annual market scale at roughly 50 billion dollars.