Nvidia posts $46 billion revenue in another record quarter — Data center and gaming GPU sales break records

Nvidia
(Image credit: Nvidia)
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Nvidia on Wednesday published its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2026, posting record revenue of $46.743 billion and marking its best quarter ever. During the quarter the company managed to tangibly increase sales across all product categories both sequentially and year-over-year. Yet, AI GPUs accounted for nearly 88% of its revenue, asserting Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware segment. But perhaps the biggest thing that will please Nvidia's investors is its outlook for the third quarter.

For the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, Nvidia posted GAAP revenue of $46.7 billion, up 56% year-over-year (YoY) and 6% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ). The company's net income surged to $26.4 billion, a 59% increase from the same period last year, despite the fact that the company's gross margin dropped 72.4% from 75.1% a year ago, to some degree due to a $180 million charge related to banned sales of its H20 AI accelerators to Chinese entities. However, Nvidia's gross margin increased sharply from 60.5% in the prior quarter.

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Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • bit_user
    Nvidia should've invested in some power generation companies, because that seems to be the looming bottleneck that's threatening to stall their meteoric rise.

    People will only buy as many of Nvidia's compute chips as they can power. And if they have to run them at lower clock speeds, due to power constraints, it'll hurt the value proposition and Nvidia won't be able to charge as much for them.
    Reply
  • jp7189
    What other industry has high volume and 70+% margins? I would guess in every other circumstance competition would swarm such a market and drive margins down.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    jp7189 said:
    What other industry has high volume and 70+% margins?
    Software. How do you think Microsoft got so big, back in the days of shrink-wrapped Windows and MS Office? Sufficiently high-volume software is like almost pure profit.

    jp7189 said:
    I would guess in every other circumstance competition would swarm such a market and drive margins down.
    Complexity of the tech + other barriers to entry (i.e. proprietary APIs and SDKs) are the main reasons. Also, it's tremendously capital-intensive, with a long runway. Lots of AI chip startups have tried, but no one other than maybe Cerebras has really been able to find a foothold in this market.

    I should note that I haven't tracked exactly how well Google and Amazon's in-house hardware compares.
    Reply
  • KyaraM
    jp7189 said:
    What other industry has high volume and 70+% margins? I would guess in every other circumstance competition would swarm such a market and drive margins down.
    Apparently Nvidia doesn't even make the top 10:
    https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry-trends/industries-highest-profit-margin/
    So the answer is, many service industries.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    KyaraM said:
    Apparently Nvidia doesn't even make the top 10:
    https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry-trends/industries-highest-profit-margin/
    So the answer is, many service industries.
    LOL, I stopped reading when I got to the third-ranked one in that list: "Psychic Services in the US".

    Yeah, I know that's a business and I can believe it's quite profitable, but I don't think it's a very large market. Plus, IMO, it borders on fraud, since they're selling something they don't actually provide.
    Reply
  • eye4bear
    I recently watched a documentary on the making of the Ford Model T, which started out to cost ~$850.00, however, as Fords sales increased and costs to build each car decreased, Ford lowered the price of each car to ~$425.00 and still became a very rich man.
    Reply