NVIDIA Q2 Revenue $96.2B Beats Estimates, Q3 Guide Above Forecast, Shares Fall 1.8% After Hours

By Fatima Gulzar Fri, August 28, 2026 at 11:32 AM PDT | 4 min read

NVDA -4.57%

On August 27, 2026, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, more than doubling year-over-year and beating the $92.2 billion Wall Street expected.

• Data center revenue rose 117% to $89 billion, above estimates near $85 billion.
• Adjusted earnings came in at $2.22 per share versus $2.10 expected.
• NVIDIA guided third-quarter revenue to $108 billion, above the $104.2 billion analysts projected, assuming no China revenue.

CEO Jensen Huang said: "AI has reached its inflection point... compute is revenue, and demand is accelerating."

Shares still fell 1.8% after hours after ending the regular session 1.6% lower, as NVIDIA guided gross margin to bottom at 71–72% by fiscal Q4, down from 75%, noting rising memory costs.

Bull Case

• The market beat shows broadening demand, not just one customer's spending. Huang said "this time last year, one lab alone was driving the buildout," while today "multiple frontier labs" and "a thriving open-model ecosystem" scale in parallel, directly countering concentration risk that has worried AI investors broadly.
• Guidance beat estimates by a wide margin, and NVIDIA's next platform is already shipping. The $108 billion Q3 guide topped the $104.2 billion consensus. Huang said Vera Rubin is "now in full production," meaning NVIDIA's next growth driver is current output, not a future promise.
• NVIDIA's biggest customers are still committing real capital. AWS agreed to buy 2 million NVIDIA GPUs and adopt its new Vera CPU, some integrated with Rubin. NVIDIA separately backed a $105 billion OpenAI data center in Ohio, undercutting fears that AI spending is close to tapping out.
• Capital returns show confidence despite margin pressure. NVIDIA spent $26 billion on buybacks and dividends this quarter, following an $80 billion buyback authorization added in May — a pace hard to sustain if management expected demand to weaken.

Bear Case

• The stock fell on a beat, and NVIDIA's beats have been shrinking. NVIDIA has topped estimates for roughly 15 straight quarters, but the magnitude of the beats has narrowed. Shares gained just 12.4% in 2026, while AMD and Intel more than doubled — a sign the market judges NVIDIA against a much higher bar.
• Margin compression is present, and NVIDIA says it is partly self-inflicted. Gross margin held at 75% this quarter but is guided to bottom at 71–72% by fiscal Q4. CFO Colette Kress said: "Memory scarcity today is being driven in large part by the AI buildout itself." This means NVIDIA's own customers' demand is raising NVIDIA's costs.
• Forward financial commitments have ballooned to a size that concentrates risk. Supply commitments, mostly memory linked to Vera Rubin, more than doubled to $279 billion from $119 billion last quarter. This is an absolute obligation that magnifies the damage if demand growth ever slows before it is worked off.
• NVIDIA's largest customers are also building their way around it. Meta plans to begin manufacturing its in-house "Iris" AI chip in September as part of a four-generation roadmap, Reuters reported exclusively. Additionally, NVIDIA's outlook assumes zero China revenue after years of shifting export rules, showing two of its biggest demand pools carry real structural risk.

Conclusion

NVIDIA beat on every headline number and still guided above expectations. Still, the stock fell. This shows where the debate now sits: not whether demand is strong today, but whether margins and commitments hold as that demand gets costlier to serve.

Insider Monkey's hedge fund database shows NVIDIA had 285 hedge fund holders as of Q2 2026, up from 275 in Q1 2026.

While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend,