NVIDIA delivered a monster Q4, posting record revenue of $68.1 billion — comfortably ahead of the $66.2 billion consensus estimate — with earnings of $1.62 per share (non-GAAP). Revenue surged 73% year-over-year, driven almost entirely by the data center juggernaut, which pulled in $62.3 billion and now accounts for 91% of total sales.
But the real headline was guidance. NVIDIA expects Q1 revenue of $78 billion (±2%), blowing past the $72.6 billion consensus and marking what would be the fourth straight quarter of accelerating growth. Jensen Huang talked up the “agentic AI inflection point” and touted Blackwell as delivering an order-of-magnitude lower cost per token for inference workloads.
Yet the stock is up barely 1% in pre-market. That tells you everything about where the market’s head is at right now — and looming large is what happened last quarter. After NVIDIA’s Q3 report in November, shares spiked 4% in the initial after-hours reaction on another beat-and-raise, only to reverse and finish the following session 2% lower. Traders got burned chasing that move, and the memory of it is keeping a lid on enthusiasm this time around.
The broader debate has moved past whether NVIDIA can hit its numbers — it clearly can — and toward whether the hyperscaler capex cycle is sustainable. The big cloud players have seen more than $1 trillion wiped from their market caps since early February on exactly those fears. AMD got punished 17% despite beating expectations.
The question is whether NVDA’s customers can turn their huge investments into chips into revenues and profits (and free cash flow) of their own, and whether the market is willing to wait years for that to unfold.
On the face of it though, the numbers are astonishing: Full-year revenue hit $215.9 billion, up 65%. Gross margins held up at 75% for the quarter. NVIDIA returned $41.1 billion to shareholders in FY26 (though much of that was eaten up by share-based comp).
The numbers are pristine. The question is whether the market is ready to pay up for them when the macro AI narrative is under pressure — and whether this time, the post-earnings fade finally breaks.
In terms of the chart, it looks good to me as it tries to break out of the recent consolidation ahead of a fresh test of $212. One thing that lingers is a recent Morgan Stanley report saying that Nvidia is the most under-owned large-cap tech stock among institutional investors. Now could be the moment they pile in.
This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.