Nvidia profit doubles to $59.7 billion, guides for 70% growth

Nvidia reported fiscal second-quarter results that blew past Wall Street's expectations, with net income more than doubling year over year on relentless demand for artificial-intelligence chips. According to the company's own report for the quarter ended July 26, 2026, published August 26, 2026, GAAP net income reached $59.7 billion, up 126% from $26.4 billion a year earlier, while revenue rose 106% to $96.22 billion — ahead of the $92.165 billion analysts had forecast, according to data compiled by LSEG and cited by CNBC.

Diluted earnings per share climbed 128% to $2.46, and gross margin expanded to 75.0%, up 2.6 percentage points from a year earlier, Nvidia said. On a non-GAAP basis, net income reached $53.95 billion, up 118%, with adjusted earnings per share of $2.22 — also above the $2.10 consensus estimate cited by CNBC. Nvidia's stock initially dipped after the results were released but reversed course and rose more than 4% once the earnings call began.

A 70% growth forecast — capped by supply, not demand

The bigger surprise came from guidance. Chief financial officer Colette Kress told investors on the earnings call that Nvidia expects revenue to grow 70% in fiscal 2028 compared with fiscal 2027 — far above the roughly 44% to 45% average growth analysts had penciled in, according to CNBC's coverage of the call. It is the first time Nvidia has guided a full year in advance, which Kress and chief executive Jensen Huang said reflects how much visibility the company now has into next year's orders.

Yet Huang made clear the forecast reflects what Nvidia can supply, not what customers are asking for. 'Our demand is much greater than 70%,' he said on the call. 'Our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%, and we're going to continue to work with our supply chain to increase on that.' The main constraint, Kress said, is memory: prices for the chips that pair with Nvidia's GPUs are rising globally amid the broader AI buildout, and she expects them to climb further into fiscal 2028 — a dynamic CNBC noted has already lifted shares of memory maker Micron.

If Nvidia hits that 70% target, and the roughly $396 billion analyst consensus for fiscal 2027 revenue holds, sales would reach around $673 billion in fiscal 2028. Based on Wall Street's revenue projections for other major US tech firms, CNBC reported that would put Nvidia ahead of Apple and Alphabet, and behind only Amazon, among US technology companies by revenue — a striking shift for a company CNBC described as 'a fairly niche chipmaker' before the AI boom.

From one lab to a 'golden age' of AI buyers

Nvidia has faced a persistent worry from investors: that its growth depends on a handful of hyperscale cloud companies building data centers largely to serve a few frontier AI labs. Huang argued that dependency is easing. 'This time last year, one lab alone was driving the buildout; today, we have a golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel, a thriving open-model ecosystem and physical AI coming online,' he said in the earnings release.

The quarter's numbers illustrate that shift. Nvidia's Data Center segment, its largest, generated $89.0 billion in revenue, up 117% year over year, made up of two categories, plus a smaller Edge Computing segment:

• Hyperscale sales — from public clouds and large consumer-internet firms such as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet — doubled to $48.7 billion; Kress said cloud-industry backlog now exceeds $2 trillion.
• AI Clouds, Industrial & Enterprise (ACIE) sales — from regional AI companies, 'neoclouds,' startups, sovereigns and enterprises — rose 138% to $40.3 billion, a category Huang said was 'largely invisible' until recently.
• Edge Computing, covering PCs, robotics and automotive chips, added $7.2 billion, up 27%.

$530 billion in commitments, and a 'circular financing' question

Alongside the results, Nvidia disclosed roughly $530.5 billion in financial commitments tied to its supply chain and AI infrastructure bets, up sharply from $366 billion the previous quarter. That includes $279 billion largely earmarked for memory procurement, and $105 billion to help finance a data center project in Ohio where OpenAI will be the tenant under a 20-year lease. Kress addressed the arrangement's optics directly: 'We know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently,' she said, arguing the investments are justified by the strength of demand and the ecosystem they build around Nvidia's platform.

Separately, Nvidia and Amazon Web Services said they would expand their partnership, with AWS deploying two million additional Nvidia GPUs across its infrastructure in fiscal 2027 and 2028, alongside Nvidia's Vera CPUs and its physical-AI software stack for warehouse robotics. For its current third quarter, Nvidia guided to revenue of $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, a figure that assumes zero data-center compute revenue from China.

For US companies that have built cloud, software or AI products on top of Nvidia's chips, the results are a reassurance that AI infrastructure spending is not slowing — but also a reminder of how concentrated that supply chain has become. With Nvidia itself citing memory shortages as the ceiling on how fast it can fulfill orders, and warning that gross margins will dip slightly next quarter, American businesses relying on a steady flow of GPUs — from cloud providers to enterprises running their own AI workloads — may face longer waits or higher costs even as demand keeps climbing.