Nvidia posts $81.6 billion quarter, guides Nvda to $91 billion
nvda reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $81.6 billion for the period ended April 26, 2026, up 85% year over year. It also said fiscal second-quarter revenue should be about $91 billion. Jensen Huang said demand has gone parabolic, even as the company is still leaning on a market where China now contributes nothing to the current-quarter outlook.
Data center drives Nvda
Data center revenue rose 92% year over year to $75.2 billion. That category accounted for more than 90% of total sales, which means the quarter was still driven mostly by the same AI infrastructure buyers that have powered Nvidia’s surge for the last several quarters.
Huang said, “Demand has gone parabolic. The reason is simple. Agentic AI has arrived.” The quote matters because it is the clearest signal inside the results that Nvidia sees the current demand wave as broad rather than temporary, and that the company is tying its forecast to a specific shift in how customers are using AI systems.
China and the $91 billion guide
The hard edge in the outlook is China. Nvidia said its second-quarter estimate assumes no data center compute revenue from China, even though China once made up at least a fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue. The company is still pointing to about $91 billion in sales without that contribution, which suggests U.S. and other non-China buyers are doing the heavy lifting.
That also sets up the main risk around the quarter. Large cloud providers are buying Nvidia chips while also designing their own chips, and AMD is pressing with its own AI accelerators. Nvidia’s revenue base is still growing fast, but the customer set behind it is not standing still.
Blackwell and Rubin targets
Nvidia said its current Blackwell and next-generation Rubin chips could drive about $1 trillion of revenue between 2025 and the end of 2027. A year earlier, it had put that figure at about $500 billion. The company is signaling a much larger internal opportunity, but that is still a target, not booked sales.
Gross margin sat near 75% last quarter, and Nvidia returned about $20 billion to shareholders while authorizing another $80 billion in share repurchases. The stock trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of about 31 and sits about 13% below its all-time high, so investors are already paying for strong execution even though the shares have gone largely sideways for months.
The next question is whether Nvidia can keep translating AI demand into actual shipments at the pace implied by $91 billion in quarterly revenue, especially with China excluded from the forecast and rivals closing in on the same cloud customers.
