Nvidia's Record Revenue Masks a Shift: GPU Rental Prices Plunge as PC Ambitions Emerge

Nvidia posts record $81.6B revenue but H200 GPU rental prices collapse 40% ahead of Blackwell shift. At Computex, CEO Jensen Huang to unveil PC chips and AI roadmap; expands US optical supply chain with Corning.

Nvidia heads into the Computex trade fair in Taipei next week with an eerily familiar mix of superlative earnings and a nascent pricing headache in its core data-center business. The chipmaker's first-quarter revenue hit a record $81.6 billion — a staggering 85% jump from a year earlier. Yet the rental rates for its H200 GPUs have collapsed by roughly 40% in just three weeks, sliding from $7 an hour to around $4. The divergence highlights a market in transition: hyperscalers are already pivoting their demand to the newer Blackwell architectures B200 and GB200, leaving the Hopper generation to lose its pricing power.

That generational shift is only part of the story Nvidia will tell on Monday, June 1, when CEO Jensen Huang takes the stage for his Computex keynote. With all physical seats already sold out and a free livestream available, Huang is expected to lay out a five-layer AI roadmap spanning energy, data-center infrastructure, physical AI, and AI agent systems. He will also unveil Nvidia's entry into the classic consumer-PC market — a direct challenge to Intel and AMD. The new processors, built on Arm architecture and integrating CPU, GPU, and AI accelerators into a single system-on-chip, follow Apple's successful M-series model. Microsoft is an integral partner in this offensive, potentially ending Qualcomm's exclusive position in the Windows-on-Arm segment.

The timing of the PC chip announcement is no accident. It allows Nvidia to showcase a broader growth narrative beyond data-center GPUs, even as the core engine of its business hums along. Data-center revenue alone reached $75.2 billion in the quarter, up 92% year over year. Operating core profit surged 147% to a margin of 65.6%, and free cash flow jumped to $48.6 billion from $34.9 billion in the prior quarter and $26.1 billion a year earlier. The non-GAAP gross margin stood at 75.0%, a sharp recovery from the 60.8% level a year ago when the company faced a $4.5 billion hit from H20 export restrictions to China.

That China factor remains a wild card. Nvidia's current outlook for the current quarter — $91.0 billion in revenue, plus or minus 2%, well above the consensus estimate of $86.84 billion — explicitly excludes any data-center compute sales to China. In the prior-year period, Hopper shipments to China totaled $4.6 billion. A relaxation of export controls would open up a significant upside, but it is not baked into the forecast. The company also guided for a GAAP gross margin of about 74.9% and a non-GAAP margin of around 75.0%.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is building out the physical supply chain to match its ambitions. It has expanded a partnership with Corning to boost production of optical connectivity components in the U.S. Corning plans to roughly double its fiber production and increase its domestic capacity for optical interconnects tenfold, adding more than 3,000 jobs across three new plants in North Carolina and Texas. The message is clear: the bottleneck isn't just chips — it's the entire infrastructure layer.

Shareholder returns are also ramping up. The quarterly dividend has jumped from $0.01 to $0.25 a share, though the yield remains a modest 0.4%. With an ex-dividend date of June 3 and a payment date of June 26, investors holding shares on June 4 are eligible. More significantly, the board authorized an additional $80 billion in share repurchases with no expiration date. In the first quarter alone, Nvidia returned roughly $20 billion through buybacks and dividends.

The stock itself closed the week at €181.40, nearly 10% below its 2025 high of €201.05 reached in mid-May. Year-to-date, the shares have still advanced 12.6%, and the relative strength index of 36.4 suggests the recent pullback has cooled short-term momentum. Analysts see technical support at €172.60 and €161.10, while the consensus price target stands at €258, with individual houses reaching as high as €425. The key question for the stock is whether Huang can deliver concrete demand signals for next-generation AI systems — not just new chip slides.

Nvidia's long-term bet remains massive. The company expects global data-center spending to surpass $1 trillion by 2027 and forecasts a range of $3 trillion to $4 trillion by 2030. That kind of ambition requires more than just a strong quarterly beat; it demands visible demand pathways. With the next earnings report due in August, Computex serves as the immediate catalyst. If Huang can show that the ecosystem is lining up to deploy the new Blackwell platforms, the current dip could prove to be an entry point. Until then, the €201.05 high remains the immediate reference for the bulls.