Nvidia has given investors its clearest argument yet that the artificial-intelligence spending boom has years left to run. The chipmaker said Wednesday that revenue more than doubled in its fiscal second quarter and forecast roughly 70% growth for the fiscal year ending in January 2028, an unusually long-range projection from a company that normally guides one quarter at a time.
The numbers explain why management is willing to look further ahead. Revenue for the quarter ended July 26 rose 106% from a year earlier to $96.2 billion, while data-center revenue climbed 117% to $89.0 billion. GAAP net income increased 126% to $59.7 billion, or $2.46 a diluted share. Adjusted earnings were $2.22 a share, above the $2.10 average estimate reported by Reuters.
Nvidia expects current-quarter revenue of $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, compared with a $104.19 billion analyst consensus compiled by LSEG. That outlook excludes data-center computing revenue from China, where export controls and licensing uncertainty continue to cloud the sales opportunity. The company is therefore signaling that demand outside China is sufficient to carry quarterly revenue above $100 billion for the first time.
The longer-term forecast is even more consequential. Before the results, analysts expected fiscal 2028 revenue growth of about 44%, according to Reuters. Nvidia’s projection of approximately 70% implies that the company expects the buildout to broaden beyond the original group of hyperscale cloud providers. Management said AI laboratories could account for roughly a quarter of the business next year, while a newly expanded Amazon Web Services partnership calls for the deployment of an additional 2 million Nvidia graphics processors across Amazon’s global infrastructure in 2027 and 2028.
Yet the forecast also changes the central question for investors. The issue is no longer simply whether customers want more computing capacity. It is whether Nvidia and its suppliers can deliver that capacity without eroding the economics that have made the company so valuable.
Finance chief Colette Kress said Nvidia remains supply constrained, while Reuters reported that higher memory prices and component costs are expected to pressure profitability. The company forecast a 74% gross margin for the current quarter, down from the 75% reported in the second quarter. Kress said margins could fall to roughly 71% to 72% in the fourth quarter as component pressures persist. That would still be an extraordinary level for a hardware company, but the direction matters when investors are paying for sustained growth at enormous scale.
The spending ecosystem around Nvidia also deserves scrutiny. The company has used investments, guarantees and other capital support to help expand computing demand. Nvidia said its maximum gross exposure under land, power and building-shell guarantees was $3.5 billion, modest beside quarterly revenue but relevant because critics question whether financing links among chip suppliers, infrastructure operators and AI laboratories can make demand appear more independent than it is. Strong end-user adoption ultimately has to validate the capital being committed throughout the chain.
Investors initially sent the shares lower after the release, then pushed them more than 4% higher in extended trading as management detailed the 2028 forecast. The reversal captured the market’s dilemma. Beating quarterly estimates has become expected. What changed sentiment was evidence that management sees the growth runway extending much further.
Nvidia has not eliminated the risks surrounding AI investment. It has raised the scale at which they must be evaluated. If demand is as broad as the company projects, the next phase will be governed less by proof of customer interest and more by supply-chain execution, cost discipline and the quality of the financing supporting the buildout. The quarter strengthened the growth case, but it also made those constraints impossible to ignore.