Nvidia beat Wall Street expectations in its quarterly revenue report on Wednesday, marking another revenue with a string of financial victories for the computer hardware giant. Revenue for the quarter ended in April was $44.1 billion, up 69% from the previous year.
The company exceeded the forecast of an investor with revenue of $43.3 billion. Adjusted earnings per share were $0.81, under investors’ expectations for adjusted earnings per share of 88 cents. The company also reported $39.1 billion in data center revenue, up 73% from the previous year.
The company is positive for the AI business, both with cutting-edge hardware and the new regulatory headwinds it faces, and investors are looking closely.
“Nvidia has once again beaten expectations, but in a market where this dominance is becoming more difficult,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at Emarketer. China’s export restrictions underscore immediate pressure from geopolitical headwinds, but Nvidia faces competitive pressures as AMD acquires position based on cost-effectiveness metrics for certain AI workloads. ”
According to Wedbush Securities Analysts, there is no more important company for “market and global investor sentiment” to “market and global investor sentiment”.
“The global demand for Nvidia’s AI infrastructure is extremely strong,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Nations around the world recognize AI as a critical infrastructure like electricity and the Internet, and Nvidia stands at the heart of this deep transformation.”
The chipmaker said it is expected to see $45 billion in the second quarter of 2026.
Nvidia’s quarterly reports over the past year show explosive growth. The company faces increased pressure from the US. Donald Trump’s April announcement that the administration had tightened its computer chip export rules effectively banned NVIDIA from selling its main source of revenue, the H20 AI chip to China. “H20 products were primarily designed for the Chinese market,” reads the company’s first quarter revenue report.
In a recent SEC filing, the company revealed that the change would cost the company $5.5 billion. The company said it saw just $4.6 billion in claims in the first quarter “in relation to H20 excess inventory and purchase obligations and in connection with purchase obligations.” In an interview with Ben Thompson, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the move was “deeply painful” and could result in $1.5 billion in revenue losses. In just the first quarter, the company “didn’t be able to add $2.5 billion in revenue from H20.”
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“In history, we have never written off that much inventory,” Huang said. “(n) I’m just losing $5.5 billion – we’ve written down $5.5 billion – we’ve left $15 billion in sales and maybe… $3 billion worth of taxes.”
The tightening rules for chip export rules come when the China Commission within the US Congress announced that it was asking Nvidia for a response on how its chips powered Deepseek, an AI company that matches the Chinese breakthrough AI model, particularly the products of the same non-calculating US companies. The committee in a new report claims that China-based Deepseek was “trained to secretly leak American user data to the Chinese Communist Party, manipulate information consistent with CCP propaganda, and used substances illegally obtained from the company.”
Analysts explain what this means over the next few quarters.
“We’ve been working hard to get the better of our customers,” said Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester.
Analysts had seen how well the company exceeded investors’ expectations in previous quarters and were trying to make sure the considerations were more tame, according to a memo from Wedbush Securities analysts.
“This quarter is about the ability to maintain strong numbers and guidance despite China’s lockdown,” reads the memo. “Investors are focusing on Jensen’s medium-term and long-term outlook as the situation in China could change rapidly in response to ongoing US/China trade negotiations.”
The company’s operations in China are still in the air, but analysts seem to be taking heartfelt care of the recent demand for Nvidia chips in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Nvidia is one of the beneficiaries of the AI wind drop that stemmed from Trump’s visit to the region, resulting in Saudi Arabia winning $600 million for US companies. Nvidia said it would sell hundreds of thousands of AI chips to Saudi Arabia, including a sovereign-funded startup from Saudi Arabia, which includes 18,000 of its latest chips.