Nvidia delivered one of the most consequential earnings reports of the year on Wednesday, and Wall Street spent Thursday rewarding it. Shares of the chipmaker jumped roughly 8.7% to their biggest one-day gain since April 2025, adding about $442 billion to its market value and pulling the broader tech sector along with it.
For its fiscal second quarter, ended July 26, Nvidia reported revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year earlier and 18% from the prior quarter, comfortably ahead of the roughly $92.2 billion analysts had penciled in. Non-GAAP earnings came in at $2.22 a share against expectations near $2.10, and gross margin held at 75%. For the current quarter, Nvidia guided to sales of about $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, well above the $104.2 billion Wall Street was modeling — and the company said that figure still assumes zero data-center revenue from China, where U.S. export approvals for older chips have translated into only a trickle of sales.
Huang's Bet on Accelerating Demand
The bigger jolt for investors came from the outlook well beyond this quarter. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress told analysts on the earnings call that Nvidia expects revenue to grow roughly 70% in fiscal 2028, far above the 45% analysts had been forecasting. Chief Executive Jensen Huang was even more direct in describing the gap between what customers want and what Nvidia can actually ship.
"Even though our demand is much greater than 70%, our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%."
— Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO
Kress added that China-related chip shipments made up less than 1% of data-center revenue in the quarter, underscoring how little the guidance depends on a market that was once central to Nvidia's growth story — and how much room for upside exists if Washington and Beijing ease restrictions.
The rally wasn't confined to Nvidia. The S&P 500 climbed 0.7% to 7,731 and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.6% to 26,541 on Thursday, with enterprise software names including Salesforce and CrowdStrike also surging after their own strong results fed a broader risk-on mood across technology stocks.
Nvidia's results now become a reference point heading into Friday's Jackson Hole speech from Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh: richly valued AI stocks have further to fall if long-term rates move sharply higher, making the chipmaker's fortunes and the Fed's tone unusually intertwined for the rest of this trading session. Investors will also be watching whether the rest of the AI supply chain — memory makers, networking equipment suppliers and cloud providers — can validate Huang's growth targets in the earnings reports still to come this quarter.
