Home Depot on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s quarterly sales expectations, even as elevated interest rates and housing prices dampened consumer demand for large remodels and pricier projects.

For the full year ahead, the company said it expects total sales to grow by 2.8% and comparable sales, which take out the impact of one-time factors like store openings and calendar differences, to increase by about 1%. Home Depot projected adjusted earnings per share will decline about 2% compared with the prior year.

In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail said “housing is still frozen by mortgage rates.” Yet he said Home Depot saw broad-based growth, as sales increased in about half of its merchandise categories and 15 of its 19 U.S. geographic regions.

Home Depot anticipates consumers will stop putting off projects as they gradually get used to higher interest rates, rather than waiting for them to fall, McPhail said. 

“They tell us their lives are moving on,” he said. “Their families are growing. They’re moving for a new job. They’re upsizing their home. They want to upgrade their standard of living. Home improvement always persists, and so the question, I think, will be around the mindset of whether long-term rates have gotten to a new normal.”

Here’s what the company reported for the fiscal fourth quarter compared with Wall Street’s estimates, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Home Depot shares were up nearly 5% in midday trading. The company was holding an earnings call on Tuesday morning.

In the three-month period that ended Feb. 2, Home Depot’s net income climbed to $3.0 billion, or $3.02 per share, from $2.80 billion, or $2.82 per share, in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 14% from $34.79 billion in the year-ago period.

Comparable sales, a metric also known as same-store sales, increased 0.8% across the company. Those results ended eight consecutive quarters of falling comparable sales. They also exceeded analysts’ expectations of a decline of 1.7%, according to StreetAccount. Comparable sales in the U.S. increased 1.3% year over year.

Regions hit by hurricanes Helene and Milton contributed about 0.6% to comparable sales, McPhail said.

Customers spent more and visited Home Depot’s stores and website more in the quarter compared with the year-ago period. Transactions rose to 400.4 million, up nearly 8% from the year-ago period. The average ticket was $89.11 in the quarter, up slightly from $88.87 in the prior-year quarter.

Home Depot has faced a more difficult backdrop for selling supplies for home improvement projects. Sales growth slowed in 2023, after consumers’ huge appetite for home renovations during the Covid pandemic returned to more typical patterns. Inflation and a shift back to spending on services like vacations and restaurants also dinged consumer demand for larger projects and pricier items.

Since roughly the middle of 2023, Home Depot’s leaders have pinned the company’s problems on a tougher housing market. McPhail told CNBC that the same challenge persisted in the fourth quarter, as consumers still showed reluctance to splurge on bigger projects, such as redoing a kitchen or installing new flooring.

Mortgage rates have remained high, despite interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. The median price of a home sold in January was $396,900, up 4.8% from the year before and the highest price ever for the month of January, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Tougher weather also hurt the company’s sales in January, and that’s carried into February in some parts of the country, McPhail said.

“Where weather is good, we continue to see engagement,” he said. “Where weather is tough, projects get put on the shelf.”

Even so, he said Home Depot has focused on ways it can move the needle, such as opening new stores and investing in its e-commerce business. 

Online sales rose 9% in the fourth quarter compared with the year-ago period, McPhail said, the strongest quarter of the year for Home Depot’s digital business. He chalked that up to the company’s investments in faster deliveries, particularly with getting appliances and power tools to customers.

McPhail said Home Depot opened 12 new stores in 2024, and it plans to open 13 new locations in the coming year. 

Home Depot has also looked to home professionals as one of its major sales drivers. It bought SRS Distribution, a Texas-based company that sells supplies to professionals in the roofing, pool and landscaping businesses, for $18.25 billion last year. It marked the largest acquisition in the company’s history.

Some pro-heavy categories, such as roofing, drywall and lumber, saw sales increases in the quarter because of Home Depot’s push to serve contractors and other home pros better, McPhail said.

Shares of Home Depot closed Monday at $382.42. As of Monday’s close, the company’s shares have fallen about 2% so far this year. That trails behind the S&P 500′s approximately 2% gains during the same period.

McDonald’s is leaning into its reputation as a breakfast value offering, vowing to reject a surcharge on meals with eggs while announcing a special one-day discount on Egg McMuffins.

The fast-food giant said in a release that to mark the 50th anniversary of its breakfast-menu cornerstone, customers on Sunday would be able to purchase an Egg McMuffin sandwich, as well as a Sausage McMuffin With Egg sandwich, through the McDonald’s app for just $1.

“At McDonald’s, breakfast isn’t just a meal; it’s a cherished tradition and cornerstone of our brand,” McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger said Tuesday. “Every morning when we open our doors, we are a breakfast restaurant.”

Coinciding with the release, a McDonald’s executive emphasized in a LinkedIn post that the chain had no intention to charge customers extra for meals featuring eggs amid a nationwide shortage that has sent prices soaring and prompted at least two other national chains to do so.

‘Unlike others making news recently, you definitely WON’T see McDonald’s USA issuing surcharges on eggs, which are 100% cage-free and sourced in the U.S.,’ wrote Michael Gonda, McDonald’s chief impact officer for North America.

The announcements come as McDonald’s tries to leave a recent slump behind: Earlier this month, it reported its worst quarterly sales drop since the pandemic — but forecast improving results for 2025.

Year to date, its shares are up some 6%, outperforming broader market indexes.

Nvidia is scheduled to report fourth-quarter financial results on Wednesday after the bell.

It’s expected to put the finishing touches on one of the most remarkable years from a large company ever. Analysts polled by FactSet expect $38 billion in sales for the quarter ended in January, which would be a 72% increase on an annual basis.

The January quarter will cap off the second fiscal year where Nvidia’s sales more than doubled. It’s a breathtaking streak driven by the fact that Nvidia’s data center graphics processing units, or GPUs, are essential hardware for building and deploying artificial intelligence services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In the past two years, Nvidia stock has risen 478%, making it the most valuable U.S. company at times with a market cap over $3 trillion.

But Nvidia’s stock has slowed in recent months as investors question where the chip company can go from here. 

It’s trading at the same price as it did last October, and investors are wary of any signs that Nvidia’s most important customers might be tightening their belts after years of big capital expenditures. This is particularly concerning in the wake of recent breakthroughs in AI out of China. 

Much of Nvidia’s sales go to a handful of companies building massive server farms, usually to rent out to other companies. These cloud companies are typically called “hyperscalers.” Last February, Nvidia said a single customer accounted for 19% of its total revenue in fiscal 2024.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimated this month that Microsoft will account for nearly 35% of spending in 2025 on Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest AI chip. Google is at 32.2%, Oracle at 7.4% and Amazon at 6.2%.

This is why any sign that Microsoft or its rivals might pull back spending plans can shake Nvidia stock.

Last week, TD Cowen analysts said that they’d learned that Microsoft had canceled leases with private data center operators, slowed its process of negotiating to enter into new leases and adjusted plans to spend on international data centers in favor of U.S. facilities.

The report raised fears about the sustainability of AI infrastructure growth. That could mean less demand for Nvidia’s chips. TD Cowen’s Michael Elias said his team’s finding points to “a potential oversupply position” for Microsoft. Shares of Nvidia fell 4% on Friday.

Microsoft pushed back Monday, saying it still planned to spend $80 billion on infrastructure in 2025.

“While we may strategically pace or adjust our infrastructure in some areas, we will continue to grow strongly in all regions. This allows us to invest and allocate resources to growth areas for our future,” a spokesperson told CNBC.

Over the last month, most of Nvidia’s key customers touted large investments. Alphabet is targeting $75 billion in capital expenditures this year, Meta will spend as much as $65 billion and Amazon is aiming to spend $100 billion.

Analysts say about half of AI infrastructure capital expenditures ends up with Nvidia. Many hyperscalers dabble in AMD’s GPUs and are developing their own AI chips to lessen their dependence on Nvidia, but the company holds the majority of the market for cutting-edge AI chips.

So far, these chips have been used primarily to train new age AI models, a process that can cost hundreds of millions dollars. After the AI is developed by companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, warehouses full of Nvidia GPUs are required to serve those models to customers. That’s why Nvidia projects its revenue to continue growing.

Another challenge for Nvidia is last month’s emergence of Chinese startup DeepSeek, which released an efficient and “distilled” AI model. It had high enough performance that suggested billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs aren’t needed to train and use cutting-edge AI. That temporarily sunk Nvidia’s stock, causing the company to lose almost $600 billion in market cap. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will have an opportunity on Wednesday to explain why AI will continue to need even more GPU capacity even after last year’s massive build-out.

Recently, Huang has spoken about the “scaling law,” an observation from OpenAI in 2020 that AI models get better the more data and compute are used when creating them.

Huang said that DeepSeek’s R1 model points to a new wrinkle in the scaling law that Nvidia calls “Test Time Scaling.” Huang has contended that the next major path to AI improvement is by applying more GPUs to the process of deploying AI, or inference. That allows chatbots to “reason,” or generate a lot of data in the process of thinking through a problem.

AI models are trained only a few times to create and fine-tune them. But AI models can be called millions of times per month, so using more compute at inference will require more Nvidia chips deployed to customers.

“The market responded to R1 as in, ‘oh my gosh, AI is finished,’ that AI doesn’t need to do any more computing anymore,” Huang said in a pretaped interview last week. “It’s exactly the opposite.”