Nvidia posted $96.2B in quarterly revenue, up 106%, and guided to 70% growth next year
Data centre revenue alone was $89.0 billion. Jensen Huang's forecast for fiscal 2028 came in far above analyst estimates, which is the number that moved the stock.
Nvidia reported revenue of $96.2 billion for its second fiscal quarter, up 106 percent from a year earlier and 18 percent sequentially, according to the company's results published on 26 August. Earnings came in at $2.22 a share, up from $1.05 a year earlier.
Data centre revenue was $89.0 billion of that, up 117 percent year on year and 18 percent sequentially, which the company attributed to the ramp of its Blackwell Ultra systems. Hyperscale revenue more than doubled from a year earlier and rose 13 percent sequentially. Edge computing, the smaller line, was $7.2 billion, up 27 percent.
The figure that moved the stock was not in the quarter. Chief executive Jensen Huang forecast roughly 70 percent revenue growth for fiscal 2028, well above analyst estimates, according to CNBC's coverage of the call.
What a 70 percent forecast assumes
A growth rate that high, on a base this large, is a statement about committed capacity rather than demand sentiment. It implies Nvidia has visibility into multi-year purchase commitments from a small number of buyers, and the visibility is real: Alphabet alone has accumulated $811 billion in infrastructure purchase commitments, and Nvidia has separately announced a partnership with OpenAI to deploy at least 10GW of its systems.
The concentration cuts both ways. Nvidia's forward revenue is underwritten by perhaps a dozen counterparties, several of which are simultaneously building accelerators intended to reduce their dependence on it. OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic all have internal silicon programmes. None has displaced Nvidia at frontier scale, and the fiscal 2028 forecast assumes none does within the window.
The financing is getting circular
The more notable development in the quarter is not on the income statement. Nvidia is increasingly the capital allocator as well as the supplier: it has discussed putting $2.5 billion into Thinking Machines Lab at a $40 billion valuation, agreed to invest about $2 billion in compute provider Nscale's $3.5 billion pre-IPO round, is leasing a Texas data centre from bitcoin miner Hut 8, and has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
Each of those places Nvidia on both sides of a transaction whose revenue it books. That is not improper, and vendor financing is old in capital-intensive industries, but it makes the demand signal harder to read from outside. A purchase commitment from a customer Nvidia has capitalised is a weaker independent indicator than one from a customer it has not.
Supply and the parts nobody mentions on the call
Two supply-chain items landed within days of the results. Taiwanese prosecutors raided Unimicron, a printed circuit board supplier to Nvidia, Intel, Google and Amazon, over allegations that China-made boards were relabelled as Taiwan-made. Unimicron said it is cooperating; no finding has been made. Separately, Taiwan indicted nine people over 74 Nvidia B300 servers allegedly smuggled to China through Indonesia, Japan and Hong Kong, with 56 more stopped.
Neither is material to a $96.2 billion quarter. Both bear on the export-control regime that determines how much of Nvidia's addressable market it is permitted to serve, and that regime, not demand, has been the binding constraint on the China line for two years.
Nvidia did not break out China revenue separately in its commentary, and has not said what share of the fiscal 2028 forecast assumes any Chinese sales at all.
Runs the newsroom. Rename this profile in the studio to your own byline.
Related
Every weekday, the AI stories that moved money or shipped code.
No cross-posting, unsubscribe anytime. See all newsletters