Nvidia reported its fourth straight quarter of triple-digit revenue growth on Wednesday, beating top and bottom line estimates and issuing a forecast that topped Wall Street expectations. The company even beefed up its share buyback program with a plan to buy back $50 billion in stock.

But shares fell 7% in extended trading.

Such is life for Nvidia, which has reached a market cap of $3 trillion on the back of the AI ​​boom. Since the end of 2022, its market cap has grown nearly ninefold, and in valuation, it now outperforms every public company except Apple. (It even briefly surpassed Apple in June.)

In addition to reporting 122% annual revenue growth on Wednesday to more than $30 billion, Nvidia said sales in the current period will rise about 80% to about $32.5 billion. Analysts had expected nearly $32 billion.

However, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC before the report came out that there were “whispers on the buy side” that the price was closer to $33 billion to $34 billion. This means Nvidia would have to significantly beat analyst estimates in its forecast to see any upside.

Rasgon, who recommends buying shares of the chipmaker, said there is no indication that demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), the key infrastructure for developing and running AI models, is slowing.

“There’s still a lot of demand,” Rasgon said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “They’re still shipping everything they can sell.”

Nvidia said it expects to deliver “several billion dollars” of Blackwell revenue in its fiscal third quarter, which ends in October. Blackwell is the company’s next-generation technology, following Hopper. There had been some concerns that Blackwell would be delayed, but CFO Colette Kress said on the call with analysts that “supply and availability have improved.”

“However, demand for Blackwell platforms is far outstripping supply, and we expect this to continue into next year,” Kress said.

Aside from missing the “whisper” numbers, some investors may be looking at Nvidia’s gross margin, which fell slightly in the quarter to 75.1% from 78.4% in the prior-year period. That’s up from 43.5% two years ago and 70.1% in last year’s fiscal second quarter.

For the full year, the company expects a gross margin of “mid 70%.” Analysts had expected a margin of 76.4% for the year, StreetAccount said.

During the earnings call, analysts asked Nvidia executives about customers and whether they were making money on their investment. Following the company’s earlier report, Kress gave investors data points showing that a cloud provider could make $5 over four years by selling access to $1 worth of Nvidia chips.

This time around, Nvidia took a different approach. CEO Jensen Huang said during Wednesday’s earnings call that Nvidia’s technology will take over work from traditional processors, such as those from Intel or AMDHe also said that generative AI would involve more coding, that companies like Meta could use Nvidia chips for recommendation systems, and that countries would start buying more chips.

“The people who invest in Nvidia’s infrastructure get an immediate return on that investment,” Huang said.

Huang also said that next-generation AI models would require “10, 20, 40 times” more computing power, echoing comments recently made by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“The frontier models are growing in size quite a bit,” Huang said.

He said Nvidia’s key customers are competing to be the first to produce new AI developments.

“The first person to reach the next plateau gets to introduce a revolutionary level of AI,” Huang said. “The second person to get there is incrementally better or about the same.”

But if you invest in Nvidia at this level, you’re betting that the company can continue to exceed very high expectations. That requires a willingness to accept the share price volatility that is typically reserved for much smaller companies.

After hitting a record high in June, Nvidia lost nearly 30% of its value over the next seven weeks, shedding about $800 billion in market cap. It has since recovered most of those losses.

Over the past two years, the stock has risen by 5% or more in a single day 50 times. Microsoftthat has only happened six times, which is one time more than Apple. Bee Metait happened 21 times. Tesla Fans, however, can relate. Shares of the electric carmaker have risen at least 5% in that period on more than 70 trading days.

One reason for Nvidia’s increased volatility is that it relies on a small group of customers, including those mentioned above, for an inordinate amount of its revenue. Top executives at Alphabet and Meta both recently admitted they may be overspending on their AI expansion, but said the risk of underinvesting was too great not to be aggressive.

WATCH: Nvidia’s Latest Report ‘Basically in the Middle’