Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-27

Nvidia sold $96 billion of chips in three months — and says the only reason next year is 70 percent bigger is that it cannot build any faster

Nvidia reported its second quarter of fiscal 2027 after the close on 26 August: revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106 percent on a year ago, against the roughly $92 billion analysts expected. Data centre alone was $89.0 billion, up 117 percent, which is nine-tenths of the company. Gross margin held at 75.0 percent and diluted GAAP earnings came in at $2.46 a share. The guidance is the louder number: $108 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, for the current quarter, comfortably above the street, and set without counting on any data centre revenue from China. The finance chief said the order book now stands at more than $2 trillion, and put hyperscaler capital spending at over $800 billion this year and $1.3 trillion in 2027. Asked about the 70 percent revenue growth Nvidia has pencilled in for fiscal 2028, Jensen Huang said the company has supply for 70 percent growth and that demand is much higher than that. On China, Huang repeated that Nvidia would hand Washington a cut of Blackwell sales in exchange for an export licence. Huang's framing of the quarter: AI has reached its inflection point, it is doing useful work, its tokens are productive and profitable — compute is now revenue. The shares rose about 4 percent after hours.

Why it mattersFor three years the bear case on AI has been that the spending is a bet on future demand rather than a response to present demand. A $2 trillion backlog and a CEO saying the ceiling is his own factory output, not his order book, is the strongest evidence yet that the bet has at least become a queue. But it is worth reading the same sentence the other way: a company whose customers are a handful of hyperscalers, whose growth forecast rests on those same firms spending $1.3 trillion next year, has concentrated an enormous amount of the world's capital expenditure into one supply chain. And the guidance quietly assumes China contributes nothing — which means the export licence Huang keeps negotiating for is upside nobody has yet priced, and the geopolitics around it is now a line item in the AI economy rather than a footnote.

✓ Verified · 4 sources

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Nvidia sold $96 billion of chips in three months — and says the only reason next year is 70 percent bigger is that it cannot build any faster

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