Nvidia Posts $81.6B Quarter, Authorizes $80B Buyback, and Guides to $91B Next

Nvidia closed its first fiscal-quarter book with $81.6 billion in revenue, up 85% year over year and 20% sequentially, then capped the report by authorizing another $80 billion in buybacks and a twenty-five-fold dividend hike to $0.25 a share. The chipmaker's Q1 FY2027 release, covering the three months ended April 26, 2026, blew past Wall Street expectations on virtually every line — and a forward guide of $91 billion for Q2 implies the AI capex cycle has not crested.

Data center remains the entire story. The segment rang up $75.2 billion on its own, a 92% jump from a year earlier and roughly 92% of total revenue. Gross margins stayed sky-high at 74.9% on a GAAP basis, and diluted EPS landed at $2.39. CEO Jensen Huang told investors the "buildout of AI factories — the largest infrastructure expansion in human history — is accelerating at extraordinary speed," and credited agentic AI workloads for "doing productive work, generating real value."

The $80 billion repurchase authorization has no expiration and stacks on top of the roughly $20 billion Nvidia returned through buybacks and dividends in Q1 alone. The dividend bump from $0.01 to $0.25 a share is a long-overdue normalization for a company now sitting on the deepest cash-flow profile in the semiconductor industry. The market read the announcement as a defense of the stock against widening worries about an AI spending bubble.

Product cadence is the other tell. Nvidia's commentary highlighted the Vera Rubin platform and its purpose-built Vera CPU for agentic AI, Blackwell-based Dynamo 1.0 software claiming up to 7x inference gains, and an expanding library of open models pitched to enterprise customers. Huang has separately framed Vera as a $200 billion opportunity that will start contributing meaningfully by fiscal year-end, even as hyperscalers including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, AMD, and Intel race to build custom inference silicon of their own.

Q2 guidance of $91 billion (±2%) — which explicitly excludes China data center compute — suggests Nvidia expects another 12% sequential climb without help from the world's second-largest economy. If hit, that would mark the eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit sequential growth and push trailing-twelve-month revenue past $300 billion, a milestone that puts Nvidia firmly inside the orbit of the largest companies in any sector.