It’s hard to overstate how unlikely it is that a business with almost $200bn of annual revenue would grow at a rate of over 60 per cent. Yet such are the fantastical finances of Nvidia. The chipmaker that dominates artificial intelligence continued to break all the rules that apply to large companies with its quarterly earnings on Wednesday. Investors who try to predict how long this can persist do so at their peril.

Nvidia is selling every piece of silicon it can make today, and piling up orders for those it plans to make tomorrow. Every indicator worth watching is therefore going up. The company breezed through analysts’ estimates of sales and profit in its latest quarter. Founder Jensen Huang had previously predicted $500bn of sales from Nvidia’s newer ranges of chips over 2025 and 2026; his finance chief now expects to beat that.

The numbers go from wild to ridiculous. The $73bn growth in Nvidia’s revenue over the past four quarters — just the growth, mind — is greater than an entire year’s revenue at Morgan Stanley or IBM. When Google’s top line was last increasing at the pace Nvidia’s is now, the search engine operator had a $150bn market capitalisation, whereas Nvidia’s is $4.5tn. Such momentum at such scale is unprecedented.