Nvidia Q1 shines, outlook raised

Nvidia’s first quarter results were better-than-expected and the company raised its outlook as demand for its GPUs remains insatiable.

The company reported first quarter earnings of $2.39 a share on revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% from a year ago and 20% sequentially. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.87 a share.

Wall Street was looking for Nvidia to report non-GAAP earnings of $1.77 a share on revenue of $78.97 billion. Nvidia also raised its dividend to 25 cents per share of common stock, up from a penny per share.

In a statement, Nvidia Jensen Huang said agentic AI is fueling AI factory construction, “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.”

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Going forward, Nvidia said it will report two units—data center and edge computing. Within the data center category, Nvidia will report hyperscale results as well as “ACIE,” or AI Clouds, Industrial and Enterprise.

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Not surprisingly, Nvidia’s results were powered by data center revenue of $60.4 billion, up 77% from a year ago. Nvidia is also reporting strong networking revenue of $14.8 billion, up 199% from a year ago.

As for the outlook, Nvidia said second quarter revenue will be about $91 billion, give or take 2%. Gross margins will be about 75%.

Key comments from CFO Collette Kress included:

• Data center revenue was driven “by the ramp of our Blackwell 300 products and demand for our InfiniBand, Spectrum-X Ethernet, and NVLink solutions.”
• Hyperscale revenue was about half of data center revenue.
• There were “no shipments of Data Center Hopper products to China occurred during the quarter, compared with $4.6 billion in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026.”
• “Accounts receivable was $40.7 billion with 45 days sales outstanding (DSO), down from 51 days sequentially, driven by timing of cash collections and customer payments received prior to next quarter’s invoice due dates. We expect our DSO to return to more normal levels next quarter. “
• “Multi-year cloud service commitments were $30.0 billion, up from $27.0 billion sequentially, to support the growing needs of our research and development efforts.”

On the earnings call, Huang said:

• "AI natives, enterprise on premise, industrial on prems, and sovereign AI. are growing incredibly fast, because everybody needs AI. We're going to see AI being adopted by every industry, every country, every company, and so everybody wants to build it in a different way."
• "We are growing share in inference, and we're growing share in inference very, very quickly, and the reason for that is this year the number of frontier model companies grew and there's some new model companies."
• "Vera Rubin is going to be even more successful than Grace Blackwell at this point. Every single frontier model company will jump on Vera Rubin from the get-go, and that wasn't true before on Blackwell."
• "The world has the world has a billion human users. My sense is that the world is going to have billions of agents. Not today, we're going to grow into it, but it will have billions of agents, and those billions of agents will all use tools."
• "All of the thinking happens on GPUs. All of the orchestration essentially runs on CPUs."