Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the 2026 CES event in Las Vegas on January 6, 2026.
Bridget Bennett Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia on Wednesday reported better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results, led by a 75% increase in revenue in its core data center business. Shares rose as much as 2% in extended trading.
Here’s how the company performed compared to the expectations of analysts surveyed 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 increased 73% from $39.3 billion in the year-ago period. The company currently derives more than 91% of its revenue from its data center division, which is powered by market-leading artificial intelligence chips.
Data center revenue for the quarter was $62.3 billion, beating expectations of $60.69 billion, according to StreetAccount.
Net income nearly doubled to $43 billion, or $1.76 per share, from $22.1 billion, or 89 cents per share, a year earlier, the company said in a press release.
The instruction was also more thorough than I expected. Nvidia said fiscal first-quarter revenue will be $78 billion, plus or minus 2%. Analysts had expected $72.6 billion. Nvidia said its forecast does not assume data center revenue from China.
Nvidia stock has outperformed all of its mega-cap peers so far this year, as the company continues to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom. As of Wednesday’s close, 2026 shares are up 5%, while the Nasdaq is down 0.4%. The only company in the trillion dollar club to make a profit this year applean increase of less than 1%.
Wall Street got a good preview of what the four major hyperscalers expect from Nvidia. alphabet, Amazon, Meta and microsoft — We reported our quarterly results a few weeks ago. Based on capital spending forecasts and analyst forecasts, total capital spending could approach $700 billion this year as tech giants build out their AI infrastructure.
Nvidia said in its CFO’s comments that hyperscalers “continue to be our largest customer category,” accounting for just over 50% of data center revenue.
In its data center business, Nvidia reported sales of $10.98 billion for its networking components, which are used to connect hundreds of graphics processing units. These sales increased 263% year-over-year, reflecting strong adoption of the company’s NVLink networking technology and Spectrum-X Ethernet switches through new agreements with leading companies such as Meta.
Nvidia’s once-largest games division posted revenue of $3.7 billion, up 47% from a year ago, but down 13% from the previous quarter. Analysts speculate that NVIDIA may not launch new gaming GPUs this year as memory constraints force chipmakers to prioritize AI processors. For Nvidia, this means AI accelerators will be sold in rack-scale systems like the 72 GPU Grace Blackwell.
Memory is a potential concern for investors due to global shortages.
Colette Kress, the company’s head of finance, said in a comment that she expects supply constraints to be a headwind for Nvidia’s gaming business “beyond the first quarter of fiscal 2027.”
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang discusses the Vera Rubin AI platform during a Q&A with reporters at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on January 6, 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin rack-scale system, the successor to Grace Blackwell, is set to be released later this year, and expectations are high. Kress said in a conference call Wednesday that the company “shipped the first Vera Rubin samples to customers earlier this week and is on track to begin mass production shipments in the second half of this year.”
Vera Rubin is expected to deliver 10x more performance per watt, providing energy efficiency at a time when data centers face significant power constraints.
The company said it will expand beyond Asia, where its supply chain is concentrated, to the United States and Latin America. Nvidia is currently manufacturing Blackwell GPUs at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s new chip manufacturing facility in Arizona, and some of its rack-scale systems are being assembled at Foxconn’s massive new factory 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 filings. “Our ability to increase our manufacturing capacity depends on the ability of our local regional manufacturing ecosystem to increase production supply to the required quantities in a timely manner.”
In the automotive sector, which includes chips for cars and robots, Nvidia reported revenue of $604 million in the quarter, up 6% from a year earlier and below analysts’ expectations of $654.8 million, according to StreetAccount.
According to StreetAccount, Nvidia reported revenue for its professional visualization business of $1.32 billion in the quarter, up 159% year-over-year and beating expectations of $755.4 million.
Nvidia has been pouring money into large AI labs and other companies in the industry, including acquiring a large stake in chipmaker Intel. The company said in its annual report that it invested $17.5 billion in private companies and infrastructure funds that year “primarily to support early-stage startups.” These investments “may not be profitable in the short term or at all, and there is no guarantee that you will receive a return on your investment,” Nvidia said.
CEO Jensen Huang told analysts Wednesday that NVIDIA “continues to work with OpenAI on a partnership agreement and believes we are close to an agreement.” The two companies announced a $100 billion deal in September, but the deal has yet to be finalized.
Nvidia said in its quarterly report Wednesday that there is no guarantee that “the transaction will be completed.”
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—CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.
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