NVIDIA
NVDA · NASDAQSemiconductors · AI Accelerators and Data Center
Since the Report + 5.1%
Close on Report DayMay 20
$220.61▼ 1.8%Report-Day Move
- Market Cap(Today)
- ≈ $5.61 T
- 1Y Return(At Report)
- + 64%
- P/E($5.84 · Trailing 12M)
- 39.7
- Net Margin(Trailing 12M)
- 63.7%
NVIDIA posted $81.62 billion of revenue in its fiscal first quarter, a fresh record and an 85% jump from a year earlier, with the Data Center platform alone reaching $75.2 billion, or 92% of the total. The stock still fell 1.8% the next day: the $91 billion second-quarter outlook cleared market expectations by 4.2%, but the options market had priced a 5.5% move around the print. From here the focus shifts to the Vera Rubin shipments that begin in the third quarter, a gross margin holding near 75%, and data center revenue from China that is still being booked at zero.
Revenue (Q1)
$81.62B
▲ 85% YoY · Record
Data Center Revenue
$75.2B
▲ 92% · 92% of Revenue
Networking Revenue
$14.8B
▲ 199% YoY
Earnings Per Share (Adjusted)
$1.87
Market Expectation $1.77
Gross Margin (Adjusted)
75.0%
Flat Sequentially · at Record Scale
Q2 Revenue Guidance
$91.0B
± 2% · ▲ 95% YoY
Quarterly Revenue ($ Billion)
44.06
46.74
57.01
68.13
81.62
89.2–92.8
- Q1 FY26
- Q2 FY26
- Q3 FY26
- Q4 FY26
- Q1 FY27
- Q2 FY27
- Annual Revenue Growth
- ▲ 85%Sequential ▲ 20%
- Data Center Share
- 92%$75.2B · ▲ 92% YoY
- China Data Center Revenue
- ▼ 100%Zero · Export Restrictions
Q2 FY27 Company Guidance
- Revenue89.2 – 92.8 billion
Midpoint 91.0 · Market Expectation 87.2Above Expectations ▲
- Gross Margin (Adjusted)74.5% – 75.5%
Midpoint 75.0% · 75.0% in Q1Flat Trajectory
- Operating Expenses (Adjusted)8.3 billion
Q1 guidance was 7.5 billionInvestment Accelerating ▲
- China Data Center Revenue0 billion
Licences granted, no revenue bookedAssumed Zero
The blue band is the company's low–high range; its length shows how much room the company left itself. The black triangle and the line beneath it mark where the market expected, and the notch in the band is the range's midpoint. The triangle appears only where a market expectation is known. Axis is ±4.8% around the midpoint.
- Operating Expenses (Adjusted)
- $8.3BGAAP $8.5B
- Tax Rate
- 16–18%GAAP and Adjusted
- Total Committed Supply
- $145BInventory · Commitments · Prepaids
“The buildout of AI factories—the largest infrastructure expansion in human history—is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value and scaling rapidly across companies and industries.”
- Demand has gone parabolic
- Vera Rubin starts in Q3
- $1 trillion of orders through 2027
Summary
In the fiscal first quarter ended April 26, 2026, NVIDIA's revenue climbed to $81.62 billion, up 85% from a year earlier and 20% from the prior quarter. The Data Center platform grew 92% year over year to $75.2 billion; the networking line inside it reached $14.8 billion, a 199% increase. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.87, beating the $1.77 market expectation by 5.6%. Adjusted gross margin was 75.0%, essentially flat sequentially. Cash from operations rose to $50.3 billion and free cash flow to $48.6 billion. During the quarter the company returned $20 billion through buybacks and dividends, approved a new $80 billion repurchase authorization, and raised the quarterly dividend from $0.01 to $0.25 per share.
Even though the report cleared expectations on every line, the stock fell 1.8% the day after the May 20 close of $220.61, and traded roughly 2% lower after hours as well. The reason is straightforward: the $91 billion second-quarter outlook sat 4.2% above the $87.2 billion market expectation, but the options market had priced a one-way 5.5% move for earnings day. The stock had set an all-time high of $235.47 on May 14 and had gained 13.7% in the three months into the print; most of the good news was already in the price. Two line items caught investors' attention: inventory jumped from $21.4 billion to $25.8 billion in a single quarter, and data center compute revenue booked from China was zero. In short, the problem was not the quarter but the height of the bar.
We score the quarter 88 out of 100; that is a grade for the earnings report itself, not for the stock. Revenue, earnings, margin and guidance all beat, and this growth is coming off a $68 billion base. Total committed supply -inventory, purchase commitments and prepaids- rose to $145 billion, which means the constraint is supply, not demand. Against that stand three reservations: five or six hyperscale customers make up roughly half of data center revenue, the China door is shut, and every one of those customers is developing its own accelerator chip. The Vera Rubin transition starts in the third quarter with volume arriving in the fourth; that is the real test. On valuation the stock still trades at a multiple below its growth rate.
Full Review
Claude92% of revenue now comes from one platform.
With this quarter NVIDIA collapsed its reporting into two platforms: Data Center and Edge Computing. Data Center grew 92% year over year and 21% sequentially to $75.2 billion, making up 92% of total revenue. Within it, compute rose 77% to $60.4 billion while networking climbed 199% to $14.8 billion. Networking growing three times faster than the company average is no accident: customers no longer buy individual chips but rack-scale systems stitched together with NVLink and Spectrum-X. That lifts the average price of every rack sold and is the part rivals find hardest to copy. Gaming, professional visualization and automotive now sit inside a $6.4 billion Edge Computing line; it grew 29% year over year but accounts for just 8% of revenue. NVIDIA has effectively become a single-segment company.
Supply, not demand, is the binding constraint.
According to CFO Colette Kress, total committed supply -including inventory, purchase commitments and prepaids- rose to $145 billion. That is roughly twice a single quarter's $81 billion of revenue and means NVIDIA has already bought the next four or five quarters. Jensen Huang said it plainly on the call: he expects to be supply constrained throughout the entire life of Vera Rubin. The company repeated that it sees $1 trillion of Blackwell and Rubin revenue from 2025 through calendar 2027. Inventory rose from $21.4 billion to $25.8 billion in one quarter, preparation for the coming ramp but also the riskiest line item during an architecture transition. NVIDIA reallocating its China-bound H200 manufacturing capacity to Vera Rubin tells the same story: the fab is the bottleneck, not the customer. This is the demand-side counterpart of the supercycle we have covered in memory and storage suppliers such as SanDisk and Western Digital in our earnings archive.
Gross margin held at 75%, but not for free.
GAAP gross margin was 74.9% and adjusted gross margin 75.0%, both essentially flat sequentially. Holding that margin at an $81 billion revenue scale is the most concrete evidence of pricing power. The company guides to 75.0% (plus or minus 50 basis points) for the second quarter and still expects to stay around 75% for the full fiscal year. The real pressure comes from memory: HBM and DRAM prices are rising while the share of third-party components inside rack-scale systems keeps growing. A year ago, in fiscal Q1 2026, margin fell into the 60s because of a $4.5 billion charge for H20 inventory that could not be shipped to China; this year's 75% shows how quickly that recovered. Even so, pushing margin higher from here is difficult; the story is now volume, not margin expansion.
China is off the books and zero in the outlook.
Data center compute revenue booked from China was zero in the quarter. Washington approved H200 shipments in December 2025 and formalized the approvals on a customer-by-customer basis in January 2026, yet the company has still not recognized a single dollar of revenue. Kress said on the call that they are uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country, which is why no China data center compute revenue is included in the second-quarter outlook. The company went further and shifted the manufacturing capacity earmarked for China H200 units over to Vera Rubin, effectively removing that market from planning. Industry estimates put the unreachable market at roughly $50 billion a year. The one silver lining: with the bar set at zero, every dollar from here counts as upside surprise.
Customer concentration is the biggest structural risk.
On Kress's numbers, $38 billion of hyperscale revenue was about half of data center revenue and grew 12% sequentially. In other words, half of the company's largest business rests on five or six buyers. All of those buyers -Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon- are simultaneously developing their own AI accelerators and deploying them, particularly on inference workloads. Huang counters that there are only five or six hyperscalers while hundreds of thousands of other companies exist worldwide, and enterprise demand outside the cloud providers is genuinely rising. Near term, though, the picture is unchanged: a slowdown in the capital spending plans of a handful of customers would show up directly in NVIDIA's revenue. Viewed through diversification, this is a good illustration of why the risk carried in a single stock can be larger than it looks.
Capital returns suddenly got serious.
NVIDIA distributed roughly $20 billion through buybacks and dividends during the quarter. On May 18, 2026 the board approved an additional $80 billion repurchase authorization; together with the remaining prior authorization, total capacity reaches $118 billion. The quarterly dividend was raised from $0.01 to $0.25 per share, a 25-fold increase. For a company that paid a symbolic dividend for years, that is a change in posture. The reason sits in cash flow: the quarter produced $50.3 billion from operations and $48.6 billion of free cash flow. At that pace the company is heading toward nearly $190 billion of annual cash generation, and it can direct much of that to buybacks rather than reinvestment.
Strengths
6- Data center revenue grew 92% year over year to $75.2 billion, with networking alone up 199%.
- Adjusted gross margin held flat at 75.0%; sustaining that at an $81 billion scale is proof of pricing power.
- Free cash flow reached $48.6 billion, turning roughly 60% of quarterly revenue into cash.
- Total committed supply rose to $145 billion, and the company says it sees $1 trillion of Blackwell and Rubin revenue through 2027.
- A new $80 billion repurchase authorization and a 25-fold dividend increase mark a shift in capital return posture.
- Second-quarter revenue guidance of $91 billion came in 4.2% above market expectations.
Risks
6- Five or six hyperscale customers account for roughly half of data center revenue, and those same customers are building their own accelerators.
- Data center revenue booked from China was zero; despite granted licences, the company put no China revenue in its second-quarter outlook.
- Inventory jumped from $21.4 billion to $25.8 billion in one quarter; write-downs during architecture transitions have already happened once.
- The Vera Rubin transition starts in the third quarter, and yield and logistics problems are common in new platform ramps.
- Rising memory and HBM prices put downward pressure on the gross margin path.
- Expectations are so high that a quarter beating on every line can still send the stock lower.
What to Watch
5- August 26, 2026 - fiscal second-quarter results: the first test of the $91.0 billion revenue outlook, the China-free scenario, and the gross margin said to hold near 75%.
- August-October 2026 (fiscal Q3) - first Vera Rubin shipments begin; the volume ramp is planned for the fiscal fourth quarter.
- Late 2026 - whether any revenue is booked from H200 shipments to China; with capacity shifted to Vera Rubin, this line now counts as upside surprise.
- February 2027 - fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year 2027 results: the first major reckoning for the $1 trillion Blackwell and Rubin order target.
- March 2027 - GTC developer conference, the annual event where the new architecture roadmap is unveiled.
Upcoming Earnings
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