Dive Brief:
- Nvidia’s “preliminary expectation” for its fiscal 2028 includes a 70% jump in revenue, CFO Colette Kress said Wednesday during the company’s fiscal Q2 earnings call.
- The anticipated rise comes as the Santa Clara, California-based company seeks to keep pace with growing chip demand spurred by investment in artificial intelligence. While the company is anticipating continued revenue growth for fiscal 2028, Nvidia also expects supply to “remain a bottleneck” at least until the end of that year, Kress said, according to a transcript.
- Still, the chipmaker’s ability to deliver “a full-stack system” across the AI industry has provided it with greater visibility both upstream and downstream, enabling it to offer a full-year forecast for the first time, CEO and founder Jensen Huang said. Although the company’s demand is “much greater” than the 70% revenue jump forecasted, its supply “allows us to confidently deliver 70%,” Huang said in response to an analyst question regarding Nvidia’s confidence in delivering such guidance. “We are going to continue to work with our supply chain to increase on that.”
Dive Insight:
The chipmaker reported $96.2 billion in revenue for the quarter ended July 26, marking its fourth consecutive quarter of growth as well as a 106% spike year-over-year, according to its earnings report. Net income, meanwhile, rose 126% YoY to approximately $60 billion.
Kress credited the revenue jump to a surge in AI demand, supported by “an expanding and diverse set of opportunities” across hyper-scalers, AI labs and other enterprises, according to the Wednesday call. Nvidia’s hyperscale revenue jumped by 13% sequentially to $49 billion, she said, primarily due to continued strength in its Blackwell chips — graphic processing units designed for AI accelerated computing needs.
Often viewed as a bellwether for the AI industry, Nvidia’s shares spiked by nearly 10% on Wednesday, as its earnings results boosted investor confidence, according to data from Nasdaq.
Nvidia’s fiscal 2027 Q2 results as well as its fiscal 2028 forecast come as AI spending, and demand for the GPU chips integral to meet rising AI compute needs, continues to jump — though much of the spending appears to remain clustered among the industry’s heavy hitters.
More than 70% of global startup capital for the second quarter of 2026 was invested in AI companies — while about a third of all global venture funding for the quarter went to Claude operator Anthropic, according to a recent report by Crunchbase. Altogether, investment in Anthropic and ChatGPT parent OpenAI accounted for 43% of all global venture funding for the first half of this year, Crunchbase said.
Nvidia is also forecasting it will retain its chipmaking crown as the spotlight on AI continues. Kress on Wednesday highlighted a $40 billion revenue opportunity attached to the company’s Vera Rubin GPUs and Vera central processing units, both specifically built for agentic AI and AI agents, according to company releases.
“Having already received purchase orders from every major hyperscaler, AI cloud, and system OEM, we expect Vera Rubin to mark the fastest product ramp in NVIDIA's history,” Kress said Wednesday.
Others in the semiconductor industry have also cited booming demand. In July, for example, Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy noted Amazon Web Services’ AI business had exceeded a $25 billion annual run rate, representing a triple digit jump, according to the company’s most recent earnings report.
Also Wednesday, Nvidia announced an extended partnership with AWS, pledging to deliver an additional 2 million GPUs across AWS’ global infrastructure, AI factories and other areas, according to a company press release.
Alongside the blockbuster quarter, Nvidia executives also pointed to concerns surrounding the company’s margins as it struggles to close the supply-demand gap and faces pressures relating to rising component costs. That includes “extreme pricing conditions” pertaining to memory chips, Kress said.
“We want to be direct about this rather than let it linger as an open question. Memory scarcity today is being driven in large part by the AI build-out itself, and unlike a component, that simply raises our cost with no offset benefit,” Kress said Wednesday. “Tighter memory supply is a symptom of the same demand surge that is driving our own growth.”
