Nvidia Beats Expectations, Fueled by AI Datacenter Boom

Nvidia continued its years-long streak of beating Wall Street’s expectations for growth on Wednesday, reassuring most investors that the AI boom, particularly the global explosion of datacenters, will continue apace.

“The buildout of AI factories – the largest infrastructure expansion in human history – is accelerating at extraordinary speed,” said Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, in a statement. “Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value, and scaling rapidly across companies and industries.”

Many analysts view Nvidia’s financial performance as a broader referendum on the AI buildout. The most valuable company in the world, Nvidia, with a $5.4tn market cap, reigns supreme in the semiconductor chip market and has cashed in on big tech’s AI aspirations by providing key components, software and infrastructure to fuel that expansion. US tech giants are collectively planning to spend some $750bn this year on AI infrastructure, a significant portion of which will go towards chips for datacenters. Huang said on Wednesday that he expected Nvidia would grow faster than the capital expenditure of hyper-scaled datacenters.

A major portion of Nvidia’s revenue comes from its datacenter business. On Wednesday, the chip maker reported 92% year-over-year growth of this vertical to a record $75.2bn. The company is facing some competition in producing chips from other tech giants, though, such as Amazon and Google.

Still, Nvidia blew past analysts’ expectations of $78.86bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, securing $81.62bn for the quarter. The chip maker also exceeded Wall Street expectations of $1.76 per share and reported earnings of $1.87 per share.

Huang joined Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Air Force One for a trip to China last week. Huang has expressed some hope that Nvidia will be able to expand into China, although it was unclear whether Chinese officials will agree to use American technology. In December, the Trump administration allowed Nvidia to export H200 AI chips to China, with the US collecting a 25% fee on these sales. “The Chinese government has to decide: how much of their local market do they want to protect?” Huang said in an interview last week with Bloomberg Television. “My sense is that over time the market will open.” Nvidia said in its outlook on Wednesday that it was not currently expecting datacenter compute revenue from China.

Nvidia’s CFO, Colette Kress, reiterated on Wednesday’s earnings call that Nvidia has not generated any revenue from sales of these chips to China and that it is unclear whether any imports will be allowed into the country. Sales of the company’s chips there have been in limbo. Trump has approved sales of Nvidia’s chips in China but said that Xi Jinping had blocked them.

Nvidia was also trying to expand its footprint in south-east Asia. On Wednesday, Singapore announced that Nvidia will be launching a research hub in the country, focused on increasing the efficiency of AI infrastructure.

Nvidia announced a new AI system earlier this year, which is expected to roll out in the second half of 2026. The chip maker has claimed that the Vera Rubin platform will be a “generational leap” that’s going to be “kicking off the greatest infrastructure buildout in history”.

“My sense is we will be supply-constrained throughout the entire life of Vera Rubin,” Huang said on Wednesday.

The CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic have said Nvidia’s infrastructure – and ability to keep pace – was key for their ability to run powerful models safely and at scale.

“The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI and robotic physical AI. Nvidia sits at the center of these transitions,” Huang said.