If you’re looking to buy Nvidia, don’t just research Nvidia.

Research the whole industry.

• Check its competitors like AMD and Qualcomm.

• See what its supplier TSMC is saying.

• Pay close attention to its customers like Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Tesla.

Of course, Nvidia’s unique financials, guidance, and management commentary is important.

But you’ll likely find plenty more relevant information to your buy/sell decision from external factors – like competitors, suppliers, and especially customers.

I mention this because on Wednesday afternoon, three of Nvidia’s top customers – Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Tesla – all reported earnings results from the last quarter of 2024.

Here’s what they had to say:

Meta Platforms (META) Earnings Gems:

CEO Mark Zuckerberg – “I continue to think that investing very heavily in CapEx and infra is going to be a strategic advantage over time. It's possible that we'll learn otherwise at some point, but I just think it's way too early to call that. And at this point, I would bet that the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale that we want to.”

CFO Susan Li – “Turning now to the CapeEx outlook. We anticipate our full-year 2025 capital expenditures will be in the range of $60 billion to $65 billion.”

[Note: This is significantly higher than $39 billion in 2024 capital expenditures.]

[Also Note: Capital expenditures (CapEx) is the money a company spends on things it needs to grow or improve, like buildings, machines, or computers. Nvidia chips are the bulk of this expense.]

Microsoft (MSFT) Earnings Gems:

CFO Amy Hood – “Next, capital expenditures. We expect quarterly spend in Q3 and Q4 to remain at similar levels as our Q2 spend. In FY26, we expect to continue investing against strong demand signals including customer contracted backlog we need to deliver against across the entirety of our Microsoft Cloud.”

Tesla (TSLA) Earnings Gems:

CEO Elon Musk – “We launched the Cortex training cluster at Gigafactory Austin, which was a significant contributor to Full Self-Driving advancement, and we continue to invest in training infrastructure out of Texas headquarters. So, the training needs for Optimus or Optimus humanoid robots are probably at least ultimately 10x of what's needed for the car, at least to get to the full range of useful roles.”

“So, it is one of those things where I think long-term, Optimus will be – Optimus has the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue. Like, it's really bananas. So that you can obviously afford a lot of training compute in that situation. In fact, even $500 billion training compute in that situation would be quite a good deal. Yeah. The future's going to be incredibly different from the past, that's for sure.”

[Note: compute is synonymous with Nvidia chips, and Elon is forecasting a lot of it.]

If you’re researching Nvidia and don’t look externally for insights, you likely would not know these quotes exist.

In my opinion, however, these quotes are the best reason to own NVDA stock.

The AI industry isn’t built in a vacuum. Its success is deeply tied to the capital spending of its biggest customers.

Right now, those customers – Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla – are signaling that demand for AI infrastructure remains strong, and they’re willing to spend big in the future.