New York, Feb 26, 2026, 04:46 ET — Premarket
- Nvidia put out a first-quarter revenue outlook of roughly $78 billion, higher than what Wall Street was looking for.
- The stock finished Wednesday at $195.56, barely moving in late extended trading after the results came out.
- Big Tech’s AI investments, potential China restrictions, and hints of a tighter chip market are all on investors’ radar.
Nvidia shares climbed 1.4% early Thursday in Frankfurt, after the chipmaker projected quarterly revenue ahead of market expectations. The upbeat forecast for its artificial intelligence processors drove the gains.
Nvidia’s results carry weight, serving as a kind of barometer for the AI hardware cycle. The sector’s been jostled by debates over spending and returns. Even slight shifts in Nvidia’s messaging often ripple through to other chipmakers and hit the broader Nasdaq.
Richard Clode, portfolio manager at Janus Henderson Investors, pointed out that “the debate” has now turned to whether companies can keep up such high levels of AI capex—essentially, all that spending on data centers and hardware. Charu Chanana, Saxo’s chief investment strategist, described the latest reaction as “relief,” yet flagged that “valuations remain stretched” and that competitive risks are coming into sharper focus. Reuters
Nvidia picked up 1.41% to finish at $195.56 in Wednesday’s regular session. Shares moved in a range from $193.79 up to $197.63, and roughly 243 million shares were traded, per Yahoo Finance data.
Nvidia late Wednesday reported fourth-quarter revenue of $68.1 billion, with $62.3 billion coming from its data center segment. Non-GAAP earnings landed at $1.62 per share. Looking ahead, Nvidia guided for first-quarter revenue of $78.0 billion, give or take 2%, and said the outlook excludes any data center compute revenue from China. CEO Jensen Huang called this “the agentic AI inflection point,” highlighting “inference” — the deployment of trained AI models — as a major demand lever. Nvidia also said it returned $41.1 billion to shareholders during fiscal 2026 and announced a $0.01 per-share dividend for payment on April 1. NVIDIA Newsroom
Wall Street showed some caution out of the gate. Nvidia’s guidance landed against the analysts’ consensus of $72.60 billion, according to LSEG data, but after-hours trading left the stock more or less unchanged—investors debated just how much of this story was already reflected in the price. “A lot was baked in to the cake,” said Ken Mahoney, CEO at Mahoney Asset Management. For Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, Nvidia’s current numbers say any AI slowdown worries “are not showing up yet.” Reuters added that Nvidia claimed it has locked in enough chip supply and manufacturing capacity well into the next several quarters, but pointed to growing supply pressure for its gaming segment. The company also clarified its forecast leaves out China data-center sales, despite having licenses to ship “small amounts” of H200 chips to China. Reuters
Here’s the risk: should Big Tech decide to rein in capex, Nvidia’s growth could stall in a hurry. Customer concentration is a double-edged sword when spending slows. Export restrictions on advanced chips headed for China still linger as a major unknown, while competition keeps intensifying — AMD’s in the mix, and some major clients are moving to design their own silicon, too.
Next up, traders are looking to the U.S. open to gauge whether the post-earnings reaction holds, with a close eye on analyst upgrades or downgrades that usually follow the earnings call. After that, focus moves to Nvidia’s GTC conference set for March 16–19 in San Jose—an event the company often leverages to set the tone for its upcoming product lineup.
