NVDA Posts $81.6B Record Quarter With $91B Guidance Stripping Out China

Nvidia's earnings report late Thursday night became the week's defining moment for the AI trade. The company posted $81.6B in total revenue and $75.2B in data center revenue, both records, while also delivering $58.3B in GAAP net income. The forward guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance. of $91B for next quarter excludes China datacenter compute entirely, a crucial detail that underscores the core demand story remains intact despite geopolitical headwinds.

The broader context matters here. Three weeks ago, nearly every hyperscaler (Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon) announced higher AI capex budgets. Street bears argued that Nvidia's beat wouldn't fully materialize because that spending would take time to flow through the P&L, or that the numbers were already baked in at bloated valuations. Nvidia's guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance. essentially shut that door; the company is committing to $91B in revenue while explicitly stripping out a major geographic segment, signaling that the underlying demand story remains both real and accelerating.

Traders are now grappling with a new wrinkle: if Nvidia trades at a 25x forward P/E while Arm Holdings trades at 100x on the back of Nvidia's promise to license Vera CPU technology and generate ~$20B in standalone revenue, is the market correctly pricing ARM's royalty capture. Consensus estimates suggest Nvidia keeps the overwhelming majority of that Vera revenue, leaving ARM to claim perhaps 2 to 5% via licensing. The valuation gap raises questions about whether semiconductor royalty-play enthusiasm has run ahead of fundamentals.

Skeptics point to the fact that Nvidia stock actually fell in after-hours trading despite the beat, suggesting the market had already priced in these results. Some worry that at these valuations, any miss, even a modest one, could trigger sharp drawdowns. But for now, the narrative has shifted from 'capex peak fears' to 'capex demand is real, and Nvidia is the essential lever.'