Nvidia’s Earnings Blowout: $80 Billion Buyback, 25x Dividend Hike, and a $91 Billion Guidance That Leaves Investors Cold

Nvidia posts $81.6B revenue, raises dividend 25x, authorizes $80B buyback, but shares fall 1.65% as guidance excludes China and AI demand remains strong.

Nvidia has unleashed a torrent of cash on its shareholders, quadrupling its quarterly dividend and authorising a fresh $80 billion in share repurchases — yet the market response has been anything but celebratory.

The board’s decision lifts the dividend from a token $0.01 to $0.25 per share, a 25-fold increase, while the new buyback authorisation adds to existing programmes to push the total available firepower beyond $118 billion. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress signalled the company intends to return roughly half of its free cash flow to owners this fiscal year. That cash pile hit a record near $49 billion in the latest quarter — $48.6 billion according to the company’s non-GAAP measure.

Investors, however, appear to have already priced in perfection. Nvidia shares slipped 1.65% on the day to trade around €189, and the stock has shed nearly 6% over the past week. The relative strength index of 29.8 suggests the equity is technically oversold in the near term.

Revenue Roars Past $81 Billion as Data Centers Dominate

The numbers that triggered the payout bonanza were characteristically outsized. Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 jumped 85% from a year earlier to $81.6 billion, with the data centre segment contributing the lion’s share at $75.2 billion — a 92% year-on-year surge. GAAP net income reached $58.3 billion, and the gross margin stood at 74.9%.

Earnings per share on an adjusted basis came in at $1.87, comfortably ahead of the consensus estimate of $1.76. The performance underscores how deeply Nvidia’s fortunes are now tied to AI infrastructure, cloud customers and hyperscale computing capacity.

Chief Executive Jensen Huang described demand for “agentic AI” — systems that plan and execute tasks autonomously — as a key driver of what he called a “parabolic” growth phase.

Guidance Smashes Expectations, but China Remains a Blind Spot

For the current quarter, Nvidia guided revenue of approximately $91 billion, with a tolerance of plus or minus 2%. That figure towers over the analyst consensus of $86.8 billion. Yet the forecast comes with an important caveat: expected data centre sales from China are entirely excluded because of ongoing US export restrictions on high-performance AI chips.

The omission means Nvidia must deliver a $91 billion run-rate without any contribution from the world’s second-largest economy, raising the execution bar for the rest of the year.

Vera CPU Emerges as the Next Growth Engine

Alongside the quarterly numbers, Nvidia signalled a strategic pivot deeper into the processor market. The company’s new Vera central processing unit targets the growing field of autonomous artificial intelligence, a market it estimates at $200 billion. Management has set a revenue target of roughly $20 billion from the Vera platform by the end of fiscal 2027. Production is already ramping, and the broader Vera-Rubin platform is on schedule to begin production in the third quarter.

The chipmaker has also revamped its reporting structure, splitting the business into two core segments: Data Center and Edge Computing. Within data center, Hyperscale generated $37.9 billion in revenue while ACIE accounted for $37.4 billion. Edge Computing, which now includes the former gaming, workstation, robotics and automotive units, contributed $6.4 billion.

The first payout of the sharply higher dividend is scheduled for June 26, 2026. By then, the Vera platform will need to prove it can translate its lofty ambitions into real-world revenues — a test that will determine whether the stock’s current coolness turns into a lasting disconnect.