NVIDIA Q1 Beat Guides $91B Q2 Revenue, Signaling Sustained Capex Demand

NVIDIA's earnings release this week reset the narrative around AI capex sustainability. Three weeks before the call, skeptics argued that despite Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon all raising capex guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance., none of those increments would flow through NVIDIA's books. That thesis has been definitively proven wrong. The company posted $81.6 billion in revenue, up 85% year-over-year, with data center revenue alone at $75.2 billion, up 92% YoY. The Blackwell GPU demand is soaring, underpinning the entire infrastructure buildout.

What matters more for the forward narrative is Q2 guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance.: $91 billion. This is well above consensus expectations of $84-86 billion. Crucially, management has been explicit that this figure excludes any contribution from China data center compute. China sales have been zeroed out of the model as trade restrictions tighten. This means the $91B number is NVIDIA's true addressable market under current geopolitical constraints, and the company is still guiding significantly above analyst consensus.

The implications cascade across the semiconductor complex and corporate capex. Amazon just announced it will add more than one million Blackwell and Rubin GPUs this year, translating to roughly 13,888 server racks, worth $30-40 billion in chip spend alone. That spend is now locked in and flowing to NVIDIA. For equities traders, the mega-cap concentration risk persists: NVIDIA and four other megacaps now drive more than 40% of S&P 500 returns year-to-date, a structural headwind for breadth.

The bear case centers on valuation and the risk of capex deceleration beyond 2026. NVIDIA's market cap now exceeds the annual GDPGross Domestic Product — total US economic output. Released quarterly in three estimates: Advance (1 month after quarter), Preliminary, Final. of Japan, the UK and India combined. If hyperscalers slow deployment in 2027 or pivot spending toward alternative architectures, the stock has no margin of safety. But for now, the AI infrastructure buildout is in its early innings, and NVIDIA's guidanceCompany-issued forecasts of future financial performance. validates that the capex cycle is real and durable.