The biggest challenge for Nvidia stock in one chart

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) growth metrics aren't impressing Wall Street like they used to.

Nvidia reported earnings on Wednesday which showed the company's earnings and revenue grew more than 100% from the prior year. But it also marked the company's slowest year-over-year revenue growth, 122%, in a year, and the rate of growth compared to the prior year was less than half what Nvidia reported in the first two calendar quarters of 2024.

Shares were down as much as 3.5% early Thursday morning.

And this growth slowdown, D.A. Davidson managing director Gil Luria told Yahoo Finance, is the chief concern with the stock right now and why he maintains a Neutral rating on the AI juggernaut.

"Next year we're going to have, at the very least, decelerating growth and possibly at some point, revenue declines," Luria said.

"Where if you look at consensus estimates, sell-side estimates, they are for the growth to continue at very, very high rates that are very hard to justify considering Nvidia's revenue is these other companies margins."

At some point, Luria argued, the big tech hyperscalers like Microsoft ( MSFT ), Amazon ( AMZN ), Alphabet ( GOOGL , GOOG ), and Meta ( META ) are going to slow their spending. And given they represent the lion's share of Nvidia's current AI chip sales , that'd likely be a headwind to future revenue growth.

"The estimates for next year and the year after that are starting to get way, way out of control," Luria said.

Nvidia's earnings call was still rather upbeat. CEO Jensen Huang described the demand for the AI leader's new Blackwell chip as "incredible." And plenty of Wall Street analysts remained bullish on the stock as fears about delays on the Blackwell chip were somewhat eased during the earnings call.

But for investors assessing a stock that has rallied more than 1000% since the start of the current bull market in October 2022, slowing growth appears to be a sticking point. As Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis wrote in a note to clients, Nvidia's guidance for current quarter revenue of $32.5 billion — plus or minus 2% — appeared to be "good but not good enough."

Nvidia's results also didn't surprise Wall Street at the same pace that they had been.

The company posted its slimmest upside surprise to Wall Street's revenue expectations since the start of 2023. Its roughly 5% beat on earnings per share was the narrowest surprise since before the AI revolution kicked off in 2023, too.

"The size of the beat this time was much smaller than we've been seeing," Carson Group chief markets strategist, Ryan Detrick wrote in reaction to the earnings release.

"Even future guidance was raised, but again not by the tune from previous quarters. This is a great company that is still growing revenue at 122%, but it appears the bar was just set a tad too high this earnings season.”

Josh Schafer is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X @_joshschafer .