Nvidia Posts a $96 Billion Quarter and Says Vera Rubin Is Already Ramping
Revenue more than doubled year over year, data center is now 93% of sales, and the next generation of racks is arriving before the current one peaks.
Key takeaways
- Revenue hit $96.2B in the quarter ended July 26, up 106% year over year; data center was about $89.0B.
- Nvidia guided to $108B for the next quarter, plus or minus 2%, with no China data center compute assumed.
- Management expects Vera Rubin to be roughly 20% of data center revenue next quarter, overlapping with Blackwell Ultra.
Nvidia reported revenue of $96.2 billion for the quarter ended July 26, more than double the year-earlier figure, and told investors to expect $108 billion next. The number matters less than the mix: almost all of it is data center, and the next-generation Vera Rubin platform is already being counted.
What happened
For its second quarter of fiscal 2027, Nvidia booked $96.2 billion in revenue, up 106% from a year ago and about 18% above the prior quarter. That cleared the roughly $92 billion analysts had pencilled in. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $2.22 against a consensus near $2.09.
Data center revenue was about $89.0 billion, up 117% year over year, which works out to roughly 92.7% of group sales. Nvidia said its hyperscale customers more than doubled their purchases, while the segment covering AI-native companies, enterprises and sovereign buyers grew 138%. The company also returned around $26 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends during the quarter.
The Blackwell to Rubin handoff
The growth this quarter came from Blackwell Ultra, the refreshed version of the Blackwell GPU generation. Nvidia's guidance says Vera Rubin, the successor platform, should account for roughly 20% of data center revenue in the October quarter. That is an unusually fast overlap: a new generation is contributing a fifth of sales while the old one is still setting records.
For buyers, this compresses planning cycles. A cluster ordered on Blackwell specs in 2025 may be racing a Rubin cluster that lands a year later at the same site. For Nvidia, it means the product cadence that rivals have struggled to match is now showing up directly in the revenue line.
China is now a rounding error
Shipments of Hopper-generation products to China ran below 1% of data center revenue, and the guidance explicitly assumes no data center compute sales there. Whatever happens with export licences, Nvidia has built a forecast that does not depend on them. That changes the political leverage: the company is growing triple digits without the market Washington keeps debating.
Why it matters
A single supplier now captures nearly all of its revenue from one use case, and that use case is funded by a small number of very large buyers. The hyperscaler doubling is good news for Nvidia; it is also a reminder that its fortunes track the capital-spending plans of a handful of boards. If those plans flatten, there is no second business large enough to soften the fall.
The counter-argument is that the buyer base is broadening. The AI-native, enterprise and sovereign group grew faster than hyperscale, at 138%, which suggests demand is not purely a few clouds topping up their own capacity.
The year in context
Put the latest print next to the January quarter and the scale of the climb is clear. Nvidia reported $68.1 billion for the quarter ended in January, a 73% year-over-year gain that was celebrated as a blowout at the time. Six months later the company is booking nearly 41% more per quarter than that. Management has also pointed to visibility of roughly $500 billion in combined Blackwell and Rubin revenue through the end of calendar 2026, a figure that frames how much of the future is already spoken for by customer commitments.
Full-year fiscal 2026 revenue had already reached a record $193.7 billion, up 68%. At the current run rate the company would pass that in roughly two quarters. Investors who once worried about a post-Blackwell air pocket have so far been answered by a faster product cadence rather than a pause, but the arithmetic also raises the bar: matching the year-ago comparison in 2027 will require another leap, not just continued strength.
Capital returns are growing alongside the business. The roughly $26 billion paid out in the quarter, through buybacks and dividends, shows how much cash the company now generates. It also raises the question of whether Nvidia keeps investing that cash into its own customers, ecosystem and supply chain, a pattern that has drawn scrutiny for the circularity it can create between supplier and buyer.
What to watch
- The October-quarter print against the $108 billion guide, and whether Rubin really hits about a fifth of data center sales.
- Gross margin during the generation overlap, when ramp costs tend to bite.
- Hyperscaler capex commentary for 2027, which sets the ceiling on Nvidia's next leg.
- Any change to China export policy, which would be upside to a guide that assumes zero.
