Nvidia reports earnings and guidance beat as AI boom pushes data center revenue up 75%

Nvidia reported better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results on Wednesday, driven by 75% revenue growth in its core data center business. The stock rose initially rose in extended trading before paring most of its gains.

Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:

• Earnings per share: $1.62 adjusted vs. $1.53 estimated
• Revenue: $68.13 billion vs. $66.21 billion estimated

Nvidia’s total revenue for the quarter climbed 73% from $39.3 billion a year earlier. The company now gets over 91% of sales from its data center unit, which houses its market leading artificial intelligence chips.

Data center revenue came in at $62.3 billion for the quarter, ahead of expectations for $60.69 billion, according to StreetAccount.

Net income almost doubled to $43 billion, or $1.76 a share, from $22.1 billion, or 89 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in a press release.

Guidance was also better than expected. Nvidia said revenue for the fiscal first quarter will be $78 billion, plus or minus 2%. Analysts were expecting $72.6 billion. Nvidia said it’s not assuming data center revenue from China in its forecast.

Nvidia’s stock is outperforming all of its megacap peers so far this year, as the company continues to be the leading beneficiary of the AI boom. As of Wednesday’s close, the shares are up 5% in 2026, while the Nasdaq is down 0.4%. The only other company in the trillion-dollar club to show gains this year is Apple, which is up less than 1%.

Wall Street got a good preview of what to expect from Nvidia when the four major hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — reported quarterly results a few weeks ago. Based on their forecasts for capital expenditures along with analyst estimates, combined capex for the year could approach $700 billion as the tech giants build out their AI infrastructure.

In its CFO commentary, Nvidia said hyperscalers “remained our largest customer category,” accounting for just over 50% of data center revenue.

Within the data center business, Nvidia reported $10.98 billion in sales for the company’s networking parts, which are used to connect hundreds of graphics processing units. Those sales were up 263% year over year, reflecting strong adoption of the company’s NVLink networking technology, as well as its Spectrum-X Ethernet switches with new deals from giants like Meta.

Nvidia’s gaming unit, which used to be its biggest, recorded revenue growth of 47% from a year ago to $3.7 billion, but fell 13% from the previous quarter. Analysts have speculated that Nvidia may skip the launch of a new gaming GPU this year, as memory constraints force chipmakers to prioritize AI processors. For Nvidia, that means AI accelerators largely sold in rack-scale systems like the 72-GPU Grace Blackwell.

Memory has been an area of potential concern for investors because of a global shortage.

The company expects supply constraints to be a headwind to Nvidia’s Gaming business “in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 and beyond,” finance chief Colette Kress wrote in her commentary.

Excitement has been building for the upcoming release of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin rack-scale systems, the successor to Grace Blackwell, later this year. Kress said on Wednesday’s call that the company “shipped our first Vera Rubin samples to customers earlier this week, and we remain on track to commence production shipments in the second half of the year.”

Vera Rubin is expected to deliver 10 times more performance per watt, providing energy efficiency at a time when data centers face major power constraints.

The company said it’s expanding its supply chain beyond Asia, where it is concentrated, and into the U.S. and Latin America. Nvidia is now making Blackwell GPUs at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s new chip fabrication plants in Arizona, and some of its rack-scale systems are assembled at a large new Foxconn plant in Mexico.

“These moves are expected to strengthen our supply chain, add resiliency and redundancy, and meet the growing demand for AI infrastructure,” Nvidia said in its financial filing. “Our ability to increase manufacturing capabilities will depend on the local region’s manufacturing ecosystem’s capacity to ramp production supply to the required volume and on a timely basis.”

In automotive, which includes chips for cars and robots, Nvidia reported sales of $604 million for the quarter, up 6% from a year earlier and below analysts’ expectations of $654.8 million, according to StreetAccount.

For its professional visualization business, Nvidia reported revenue of $1.32 billion for the quarter, up 159% year over year and ahead of expectations for $755.4 million, according to StreetAccount.

Nvidia has been pouring money into large AI labs and other companies in the industry, including taking a large stake in chipmaker Intel. The company said in its annual filing that it invested $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds during the year, “primarily to support early‑stage startups.” Those investments “may not become profitable in the near term, or at all, and there can be no assurance that we will realize a return on our investments,” Nvidia said.

CEO Jensen Huang told analysts on Wednesday that Nvidia continues “to work with OpenAI toward a partnership agreement and believe we are close.” The two companies announced a $100 billion deal in September, but that agreement has yet to finalize.

In its annual filing Wednesday, Nvidia reiterated that there is no assurance “that a transaction will be completed.”

— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

WATCH: First look at Nvidia’s next AI system, Vera Rubin