Nvidia posted blockbuster earnings on Wednesday, giving fresh proof that the artificial intelligence boom is still going strong, and that the $5 trillion chipmaker remains its biggest beneficiary.
For the three months ending in July, the company pulled in $96.2 billion in revenue, up 106% from a year ago. Looking ahead, Nvidia forecast sales of around $108 billion for the current quarter, comfortably above the $104 billion that Wall Street had estimated.
Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang, framed the moment as a turning point for the industry. He said AI has moved past the experimental phase and is now doing real, revenue-generating work, with computing power itself becoming a direct source of income.
“AI has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue,” he said.
Nvidia Q2 Earnings Breakdown: Record Profit, Rising Costs, and Explosive Data Center Growth
Net Income: Nvidia posted net income of $59.69 billion, or $2.46 a share, in the latest quarter, with a gross margin of 75%. That was more than double the $26.42 billion, or $1.08 a share, recorded a year earlier. Looking ahead, the company guided for a gross margin of around 74% in the current quarter, slightly under the 75% Wall Street had anticipated.
Operating expenses: Higher sales and profits came with rising costs. Operating expenses climbed 55% to $8.41 billion. For the current period, Nvidia expects revenue of about $108 billion. If it reaches that figure in the August-to-October quarter, sales would be up roughly 89% from a year ago, underscoring that its rapid growth is still gathering pace.
Data centre revenue: The company’s data-centre revenue reached $89 billion, which is a 117% increase from the previous year.
Edge computing revenue: Revenue from Edge Computing reached $7.2 billion in the second quarter,up 13% from the previous quarter and 27% year over year.
Huang sees AI infrastructure expansion running at ‘full tilt’
Huang pointed to a broader shift in who’s driving demand. A year ago, he noted, the buildout was largely powered by a single major lab. Now, he described a far more crowded field: a wave of new AI startups and labs, several frontier players scaling up simultaneously, a flourishing open-source model scene, and physical AI systems beginning to come online — all fueling momentum both domestically and globally.
He said the AI infrastructure expansion as running at “full tilt”, and added that the company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, now fully in production, was designed with precisely this surge in mind.
Solid Nvidia numbers may not be enough to restart AI stocks, say Analysts
Chuck Carlson, chief executive officer at Horizon Investment Services in Hammond, Indiana, which holds Nvidia shares told Reuters, “it’s positive news for the AI sector.”
“How it translates to AI stocks, that’s a tougher thing because the market right now, we’re in the midst of a rotation and is that rotation going to continue or is this going to jumpstart those stocks again?” Carlson added.
“I don’t know if it was enough to do that, but in terms of the AI idea or investment thesis, I think this is still solid.”
Heading into Wednesday’s announcement, the chipmaker had topped analyst forecasts for eight quarters running. That track record seemed to shape expectations going in. Reuters reported that options traders had priced in a swing of about 5.4% in either direction once markets opened Thursday – a notably smaller move than the 6.5% swing they’d braced for ahead of Nvidia’s May report.
Seth Hickle, chief investment officer at Mindset Wealth Management, a firm holding both Nvidia stock and put options betting on a potential price drop, told Reuters the stock’s move landing within that expected range showed the options market had, for now, correctly gauged the reaction.
He argued that Nvidia’s real challenge these days isn’t posting solid results; it’s clearing a bar that’s already set sky-high by investors who’ve come to expect nothing less than spectacular. At this point, he said, simply beating Wall Street’s numbers is treated less like an achievement and more like the baseline cost of staying in the game.
The ‘risk factor’ for Nvidia
Nvidia, in its results filing, flagged indebtedness as a “risk factor”, warning that carrying this much borrowed money could eventually weigh on its finances and cash position, reported CNBC.
The numbers tell the story. As of July 26, 2026, Nvidia had $33.5 billion worth of senior notes on its books, plus access to a $25 billion commercial paper program. Senior notes, for context, are essentially corporate IOUs, bonds that sit at the front of the line for repayment if a company were ever to go under.
What stands out is how quickly the near-term debt picture has shifted. Nvidia now owes $15 billion that comes due within the next one to five years, a massive jump from the $2.75 billion it had reported just one quarter earlier.
Nvidia’s statement read, “Maintenance of our indebtedness, contractual restrictions, and additional issuances of indebtedness could cause us to dedicate a substantial portion of our cash flows from operations towards debt service obligations and principal repayments.”
AWS and NVIDIA expand partnership for next-gen AI infrastructure
Meanwhile, Nvidia and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced a significant expansion of their long-running partnership. The move comes as demand for AI infrastructure continues to rise sharply around the world.
Building on strong customer uptake of NVIDIA-powered computing on AWS, the two companies plan to roll out an additional 2 million NVIDIA GPUs across AWS’s worldwide data centers.
They will also intensify joint efforts in AI factories, CPUs, networking, open models, data processing, and robotics. The goal is to deliver co-engineered AI solutions that help customers develop and deploy artificial intelligence faster and at greater scale than before.