NVDA Guides $91B Excluding China While ARM Surges 15% on AI Repricing

Nvidia's earnings report late Thursday handed Wall Street a number that already assumes zero China data center contribution, undercutting bears who wagered capex would crack. Record Q1 revenue of $81.6B and data-center revenue of $75.2B left no room for the narrative that hyperscaler spending would plateau after three straight quarters of guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance. raises from Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. The market's reaction, a slide after hours despite a beat, reflects the baseline becoming so high that executing perfectly is priced in.

CEO Jensen Huang guided $91B for the coming quarter and flagged $5.4 trillion in longer-term enterprise AI spending commitments. The forward guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance. brushes aside inventory jitters and supply-chain headwinds that plagued semiconductors in prior cycles. ARM Holdings surged 15% to $256.59 on the coattails, with traders repricing the chip ecosystem as one coherent AI-buildout play. Meanwhile, broader chip strength, AMD up 8%, broadcom and Intel included in daily movers, signaled the semiconductor complex is rotating from a single-name story into a sector bid.

The concentration risk, however, is now explicit. Top four mega-cap tech stocks (including NVDA) now account for over 40% of S&P 500 year-to-date returns, with breadth lagging. Bank of America warned that mega IPOs like SpaceX and OpenAI threaten to push tech weighting beyond roaring-1920s bubble levels if valuations keep compressing into a shrinking handful of names. Nvidia trades at a forward P/E of 25x, a discount to pre-AI history, yet the stock's move is entirely pinned to execution, leaving little room for derating if guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance. shifts.

Skeptics point to the fact that Nvidia's China guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance. is already zeroed out, removing a key bear-case catalyst. If US-Iran tensions ease and oil retreats, or if hyperscalers slow capex due to software-stacking efficiency gains, the stock has little margin of safety. Conversely, bulls see the $5.4T spend commitment as multi-year runway that makes valuation expansion justified.