The chipmaker's fourth-quarter results and eye-popping guidance left little room for complaint. So why did the stock barely move?
Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA, XETRA:NVD) delivered another quarter that, by any normal measure, would be considered extraordinary. Revenue hit $68.1 billion, beating Wall Street's $66.2 billion forecast. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.62, comfortably ahead of the $1.53 consensus. And the guidance for the current quarter was even more striking: $78 billion at the midpoint, against expectations of around $73 billion.
For UK investors holding the stock through SIPPs, global ETFs or direct US share purchases, these are the numbers that matter most. They confirm that demand for Nvidia's AI chips is not just holding up, but accelerating. Revenue in the data centre division, which now accounts for more than 91% of total sales, grew 75% year-on-year to $62.3 billion.
Growth is getting faster
What makes this quarter unusual is not just the beat. It is the direction of travel. Q4 revenue growth came in at 73%. The midpoint of Q1 guidance implies 77%. That is acceleration, and it is rare for a company of Nvidia's size.
Net income nearly doubled to $43 billion. The company is sitting on $62.6 billion in cash and equivalents, up $20 billion in a year. These are not fragile numbers.
Hargreaves Lansdown's Matt Britzman was blunt in his assessment. Expectations for 2026 and 2027 revenues are clearly too low, he said, and a wave of analyst upgrades should follow.
Hyperscalers are still spending
The context for these results was set weeks ago, when Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft reported their own numbers. Their combined capital expenditure this year could approach $700 billion, the bulk of it going toward AI infrastructure. Nvidia confirmed that hyperscalers remain its largest customer category, accounting for just over half of data centre revenue.
But the company also flagged growing enterprise adoption. AI agents are spreading into corporate environments, which could gradually reduce Nvidia's dependence on a handful of mega-customers. That concentration risk has been a persistent concern for some investors. It has not gone away, but the direction is encouraging.
Networking sales tripled
One figure buried in the results deserves attention. Nvidia's networking revenue, covering the components that connect hundreds of GPUs together, hit $10.98 billion. That is up 263% year on year. It reflects the shift toward rack-scale AI systems, where hundreds of processors work in concert and high-speed interconnects become critical. Nvidia's NVLink technology and its Spectrum-X Ethernet switches are both gaining traction. Meta is among the new customers.
China excluded from forecasts
Nvidia's Q1 guidance does not assume any revenue from China. That is some statement. The company expects to grow revenues by roughly 77% while treating the world's second-largest economy as a write-off.
The picture is not entirely bleak. Beijing did approve the purchase of 400,000 older H200 GPUs by major Chinese tech companies earlier this year. But the broader trade friction means China is unlikely to become a meaningful customer again soon. The fact that Nvidia can post these numbers without it tells you something about the depth of demand elsewhere.
Supply chain moves beyond Asia
Nvidia is diversifying its manufacturing base. It is now producing Blackwell GPUs at TSMC's new fabrication plants in Arizona, and some rack-scale systems are assembled at a large Foxconn facility in Mexico. The company said these moves are intended to add resilience and redundancy, but also acknowledged that scaling up depends on local manufacturing ecosystems reaching the required capacity.
Vera Rubin is on its way
The company confirmed it shipped first samples of its next-generation Vera Rubin systems to customers this week, with production shipments expected in the second half of the year. Vera Rubin is designed to deliver 10 times the performance per watt of current systems, a significant step at a time when power consumption is becoming a serious constraint for data centres.
Gaming and other segments
Gaming revenue rose 47% year on year to $3.7 billion but fell 13% from the previous quarter. Memory constraints are forcing chipmakers to prioritise AI processors, and Nvidia warned that supply issues would be a headwind for its gaming business going forward.
Professional visualisation was a surprise bright spot, with revenue of $1.32 billion, up 159% year on year and well ahead of expectations. Automotive came in slightly below forecasts at $604 million.
Stock barely moved. Here is why that matters
After the initial pop in after-hours trading, Nvidia's share price gave back most of its gains. That is not a reflection of the results. It is a reflection of where expectations already sit.
Nvidia stock is up 3.6% in 2026, outperforming every other trillion-dollar company. The semiconductor sector has led the broader tech market this year. At some level, the results confirmed what the market already believed.
There is also a valuation puzzle. Despite the growth, Nvidia trades at only a modest premium to the wider market on a forward price-to-earnings basis.
That suggests investors are pricing in a question they cannot yet answer: how long can this last? The current spending wave is real, but the market wants to know what happens when AI shifts from training to inference, and whether Nvidia's dominance holds in that world.
As Britzman put it, a clearer narrative from management on how Nvidia plans to optimise for everyday AI tasks could loosen the shackles keeping the valuation from reaching its full potential.
What UK investors should take from this
For private investors holding Nvidia through SIPPs, ISAs or global tracker funds, the earnings picture is about as strong as it gets. Revenue growth is accelerating into a massive demand environment. The balance sheet is pristine. The product pipeline is stacked.
The risk is not in the current numbers. It is in the duration of the cycle and the competitive dynamics that may emerge as AI matures.
For now, Nvidia remains the dominant supplier of the hardware powering the biggest infrastructure buildout since the cloud. Thursday's trading in London and New York will show whether the market is ready to pay up for that, or whether it needs more convincing.