Nvidia's $81.6 Billion Quarter: The Vera Rubin Chip, a 2,400% Dividend Jump, and a Market That Wants More

Nvidia posts record revenue and net income, unveils $80B buyback and 2,400% dividend hike, but stock stalls as high expectations price in perfection.

Nvidia turned in a quarter that would make most companies blush — $81.6 billion in revenue, net income tripling to $58.3 billion, and a forecast of $91 billion for the current period — yet the stock barely budged. The pattern is becoming familiar: when a stock trades at a premium that assumes perfection, even a record is just table stakes.

Capital returns on an unprecedented scale

The chipmaker's board didn't hold back. Alongside the earnings release came an additional $80 billion share buyback authorization, approved on May 18, 2026, with no expiration date. Together with leftover capacity from the previous program, Nvidia now has around $118 billion in firepower for repurchases. In the first quarter alone, it returned $20 billion to shareholders — the highest single-quarter total in company history.

The dividend got a jolt too. Nvidia raised its quarterly payout from a token $0.01 to $0.25 per share — a 2,400% jump. On an annualized basis, that works out to roughly $24.3 billion, though it remains a symbolic gesture relative to the $58.3 billion in net income generated over just three months. CFO Colette Kress confirmed the company intends to distribute at least 50% of free cash flow to shareholders, which stood at about $48.6 billion for the quarter — almost double the year-ago level.

The datacenter and networking double act

The core datacenter segment delivered $75.2 billion in revenue, up 92% from a year earlier. Within that, the networking business stole the spotlight, surging 199% to $14.8 billion as hyperscalers pour money into expanding AI clusters. CEO Jensen Huang declared the arrival of an "Agentic AI" era, with demand for compute infrastructure growing "parabolically."

Vera Rubin: A $200 billion CPU bet

Underpinning the growth is Nvidia's next-generation architecture, Vera Rubin. The design combines 72 GPUs and 36 CPUs across six chips, promising five times the performance of the current Blackwell generation. Huang sees this as Nvidia's entry into a $200 billion CPU market — and customers are buying in early. Orders for 2026 already exceed $20 billion. All major hyperscalers are deploying Nvidia's Arm-based Vera CPUs, according to Kress, and the company expects to generate nearly $20 billion in CPU revenue this year alone. Full market availability is slated for end of 2026, with large 1,000-chip clusters offering tenfold gains in AI inference efficiency. Nvidia also released Dynamo 1.0, open-source software designed to accelerate inference on Blackwell GPUs by a factor of seven.

Guidance that beats the street

Looking ahead, management guided for second-quarter revenue of approximately $91 billion, comfortably above the analyst consensus of $86.8 billion. The implied year-over-year growth of roughly 95% excludes all China revenue — a reminder of the geopolitical constraints that continue to cap Nvidia's addressable market. Gross margin is expected to land around 75%.

Analysts stay bullish

Wall Street remains firmly in Nvidia's corner. In one poll of 54 analysts, 52 rate the stock a buy, while a separate survey of 42 found 40 in the buy camp. The average price target stands at $299, with HSBC recently lifting its target to $325, citing disciplined capital allocation and Nvidia's leadership in sovereign AI. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.87, marking the 22nd earnings beat in the last 24 quarters. At a forward P/E of roughly 25, Nvidia looks cheap compared to AMD at 61 and Broadcom at 37.

The market's cool response

Despite the fundamentals, the stock reacted with a shrug. Shares traded at around €188.90 in Frankfurt, roughly 6% below the 52-week high, having dipped as low as €187 earlier. The relative strength index sits near 40, well short of overbought territory. Since the spring of 2025, Nvidia has failed to gain in the session following a single quarterly report — yet over that same period the stock has climbed more than 60%. The ground-breaking for "Nvidia Constellation," the company's new headquarters in Taiwan's Beitou-Shilin Technology Park, scheduled for May 27 with Jensen Huang in attendance, underscores how tightly Nvidia and TSMC are now linked. The next real test will come with second-quarter results, when investors will see whether the $91 billion forecast holds — and whether China ever returns to the equation.