Nvidia postQ: Growth outlook resets expectations well above preQ consensus

NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) delivered another strong quarter, with revenue and earnings coming in ahead of Visible Alpha consensus estimates, but the bigger takeaway was its outlook for FY 2028.

The company expects revenue to grow by about 70%, far above the 44% growth embedded in Visible Alpha preQ consensus.

In addition to its strong outlook, on September 3, 2026, Nvidia announced that it will purchase opensource AI platform, Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. This acquisition will likely help to diversify Nvidia’s business model and align with both closed and opensource platforms, while giving Hugging Face more support and infrastructure to scale.

Looking at earnings summaries compiled by S&P Global Pronto NLP, along with Visible Alpha pre-quarter consensus expectations and revised outlook, here are some key takeaways.

Post-Q2 takeaways

Nvidia continued to materially outperform at scale. Q2 revenue rose 106% year-over-year to $96.2 billion, 4.2% above consensus expectations. Adjusted diluted EPS of $2.22 came in 6% ahead of consensus, while non-GAAP net income of $54 billion beat consensus by 5.8%. The company’s revenue more than doubled year-over-year for the fourth consecutive quarter.

Data Center remains the growth engine. Data center revenue jumped 117% to $89 billion, 3.6% above consensus. Hyperscale revenue rose 102% to $48.7 billion, beating expectations by 11.7%, while AI cloud, industrial and enterprise revenue segment increased 138% to $40.3 billion, missing expectations by 4.1%.

Margins held up despite rising investment and component costs. Non-GAAP gross margin came in slightly above consensus, while Data Center gross margins were broadly in line. Gaming gross margin was a more significant positive surprise at 58.46%, 151 basis points above expectations.

Guidance 

For Q3 FY 2027:

• Revenue of around $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, above Visible Alpha’s preQ consensus of $105.4 billion. The guidance assumes no Data Center compute revenue from China.
• GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin of 74%, below consensus expectations. Management has also warned that rising memory costs will pressure margins.
• GAAP operating expenses of ~$9.2 billion, slightly below expectations.
• Non-GAAP operating expenses of ~$9 billion, modestly above consensus.

For the full year, the biggest change in the outlook came further out.

• Nvidia expects approximately 70% revenue growth in FY 2028, compared with 44% that analyst expected before the earnings.
• For FY 2027, Nvidia expects a GAAP and non-GAAP tax rate of 16%-18%, excluding discrete items and material changes to its tax environment.

This article was published by Visible Alpha, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.