Just three weeks ago, Nvidia became the first publicly traded company to be worth more than $5 trillion thanks to the cutting-edge computer chips it makes for artificial intelligence.

On Wednesday, Nvidia provided a reminder of just how much the world craves those chips. The company said that in its most recent quarter, its profit was $31.9 billion, up 65 percent from a year earlier and 245 percent from the year before that. Among the tech industry’s giants, only Google’s parent company, Alphabet, made more money in the same quarter.

Nvidia controls about 90 percent of the market for the chips used in A.I. projects, and its financial performance has become a bellwether for the tech industry, which is investing trillions of dollars in big data centers all over the world.

Nvidia’s eye-popping profit could be enough to calm nerves on Wall Street, where there are increasing concerns that lavish spending is getting way ahead of demand for the products and services that Silicon Valley’s engineers are building.

The S&P 500 is down 3.6 percent since Nvidia, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, hit its $5 trillion milestone. Shares of Nvidia have fallen 10 percent during that time, though they are still up 34 percent this year.

Nvidia has become the premier example of a U.S. economy divided into two markets: Tech stocks have soared behind the A.I. boom, while several companies that rely on consumer spending have slumped.

Hours before Nvidia reported its results, Target said holiday sales would be slower than last year and added that factors like the government’s shutdown and pause in food assistance had weighed on its business.

Nvidia has experienced heady growth since the A.I. boom started three years ago, and the most recent quarter was no different. In the three months that ended in October, the company said, sales of its chips for A.I. data centers rose 44 percent to $51 billion. The business helped lift the company’s total revenue to $57 billion, eclipsing Wall Street’s expectation of $55.2 billion.

Importantly, Nvidia also provided hints that a company with a stranglehold on an essential product can continue growing fast, even as total sales mushroom. Nvidia’s revenue in the current quarter is projected to rise 65 percent from a year ago to $65 billion, in line with recent quarters. The forecast blew pastWall Street’s forecast for sales of $57 billion.

“There’s been a lot of talk about an A.I. bubble,” Jensen Huang, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, said during a call with analysts. The A.I. that Nvidia is helping other companies create, he added, is “transformational.”

Shares of the company rose nearly 5 percent in after-hours trading. Its gains increased as Colette Kress, Nvidia’s finance chief, highlighted in a call with financial analysts how spending on data centers by tech companies has risen to $600 billion this year, a more than $200 billion increase from what they had planned at the start of the year.

In recent months, Nvidia has worried investors because it is making investments in some of the customers that buy its chips. The deals have raised questions about whether Nvidia is paying itself. For example, it announced that it would invest $100 billion in OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT. The start-up receives that money as it buys or leases Nvidia’s chips.

On Tuesday, Nvidia announced a similar deal with another A.I. company: Nvidia will invest $10 billion in Anthropic, which will buy $30 billion in A.I. computing backed by Nvidia chips. Goldman Sachs has estimated that Nvidia will make 15 percent of its sales next year from what critics call circular deals.

“The fundamentals for the company are still intact, but you have these clouds that keep popping up,” said Daniel Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus, a bank.

Mr. Huang defended Nvidia’s investments, saying they were all done to expand the reach of Nvidia’s software system and allow the company to work at a deeper, technical level with the start-ups at the forefront of A.I. development.

“We’re getting a share of investment in what will be a very successful company, oftentimes a once-in-a-generation company,” he said.

Nvidia is also facing questions about increased competition. AMD, which also makes high-quality A.I. chips, recently struck its own deal with OpenAI, and Qualcomm, another chipmaker, struck a deal to sell its A.I. products to Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Huang has remained optimistic about Nvidia’s prospects. Last month, he revealed that the company was expecting $500 billion in sales through the end of next year, which would more than double what it made over the previous two years.

During the call with analysts, the company said it had completed a deal to sell up to 150,000 chips to Amazon and Humain, Saudi Arabia’s A.I. company, for data centers in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The deal will result in the kingdom’s buying 400,000 to 600,000 chips over the next three years.

“Each country will fund their own infrastructure,” Mr. Huang said. He added that many countries and companies around the world are only now beginning to embrace A.I. “All of those different industries are now getting engaged.”

The company’s sales are growing even as it remains blocked from selling to China. Beijing has discouraged Chinese companies from buying Nvidia’s chips, hindering its access to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Mr. Huang had been appealing to President Trump to approve the sale of Nvidia’s latest line of chips to China and encouraging Beijing to allow companies to buy them.

But Mr. Trump’s advisers discouraged him from weighing in on the issue for national security reasons when he recently met with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Mr. Trump instead said Mr. Huang would have to negotiate directly with the Chinese.

Joe Rennison contributed reporting.