Nvidia sells the chips the big AI builders buy. It beat its own guidance by five billion dollars and raised its guidance again. Its revenue is the five biggest AI builders’ capital spending, seen from the seller’s side of the invoice. And its cash flow statement shows what it is currently costing to finance that spending.
| Line | Expected | Delivered |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $91.0B ±2% own guidance ≈$91.9B analysts | $96.2B (+18% on prior quarter, +106% on a year earlier) |
| Data Center | — | $89.0B (+117% on a year earlier); 92.5% of revenue |
| Edge Computing | — | $7.2B (+27% on a year earlier) |
| Earnings per share (standard US accounting) | ≈$2.08 | $2.46 (+128% on a year earlier) |
| Earnings per share (company’s adjusted measure) | — | $2.22 |
| Gross margin | — | 75.0% (74.9% prior quarter) |
| Own guidance, next quarter (Q3 FY27) | — | $108.0B ±2%, another +12.2% on this quarter |
| Operating cash flow | — | $24.1B, against an accounting profit of $59.7B |
| Returned to shareholders | — | $26.0B; ≈$99.0B of approved share buybacks still unused |
Nvidia’s second fiscal quarter ended 26 July 2026. Its guidance for the third quarter again assumes no revenue from data-centre computing products in China. Figures are from the results filing (form 8-K) made on 26 August 2026 and the results release attached to it; the after-hours share move and the comments on the call are from press coverage, cited below.
The three clocks at the top of this page ask three questions: is AI revenue growing fast enough (demand), is the company still committed to the spending (capex), and are investors still willing to wait (patience). Nvidia is not one of the five biggest AI builders named by the Bank for International Settlements (the BIS, a bank owned by the world’s central banks), and this site’s model leaves it out. That is deliberate, and it is not a technicality. Nvidia’s revenue is the five’s capital spending, the money they spend on chips, buildings and power that last for years, seen from the seller’s end of the invoice. Adding it to the spending total would count the same dollars twice: once as one company’s spending and once as another’s sales. So Nvidia’s row on the tracking page has no growth line against the required pace, no slice of the gap chart, and no line on the strain chart.
What the results give instead is an early reading of the five’s spending, ahead of their own reports. Nvidia’s guidance rests on orders already placed, so $108 billion of guidance for next quarter tells you what its customers are spending about two months before those customers report it. On that reading the answer is clear. Nobody is easing off. The guidance implies another 12% rise in a single quarter, on top of a quarter that was already 18% above the one before.
The profit figures and the cash figures tell noticeably different stories, and the gap between them is the most interesting thing in the filing. Profit was $59.7 billion. Operating cash flow, the cash the business actually brought in from its normal operations, was $24.1 billion. That is 40 cents of cash for every dollar of accounting profit, against 58 cents in the same quarter a year ago.
Two items explain most of the difference. First, money owed by customers but not yet paid rose by $22.3 billion during the quarter, equal to 23% of all the revenue recorded in it. Nvidia is now owed $63.1 billion, against $38.5 billion at the start of the fiscal year. Put another way, the average customer now takes about 60 days to pay, up from about 51. Second, $7.8 billion of the quarter’s profit is the rise in the recorded value of shares Nvidia holds in other companies: an accounting gain, not cash. That is 13% of the quarter’s profit and 20% of the half-year’s.
None of this is improper. Unpaid bills grow with sales, and a business growing 18% in a quarter will have more of them. But it is exactly what this page exists to watch, seen from a new angle. The front page’s strain chart shows the five paying for their purchases less and less out of their own operating cash flow: Amazon’s capital spending is about 107% of its operating cash flow, Oracle’s about 174%. The same strain shows up at the supplier’s end. The sales are recorded; the cash comes later.
The investing section of the cash flow statement carries the number that most deserves attention. Nvidia spent $15.8 billion buying shares in other companies in the quarter, and $42.4 billion over the half-year, against $4.4 billion on its own property and equipment in the same six months. For every dollar it invested in itself, it invested roughly nine and a half in other companies.
Its holdings have grown to match. Its shares in other companies, listed and unlisted, now stand at about $93.9 billion, up from about $35.1 billion at the start of the fiscal year: close to $58.8 billion added in six months. Over the same half-year its long-term debt went from $7.5 billion to $32.4 billion, with $24.9 billion borrowed in the second quarter alone. Meanwhile $19.7 billion went on buying back its own shares and $6.0 billion on dividends. A company bringing in $24 billion of operating cash in a quarter does not need to borrow to run itself. The money is being put to work on something else.
Set that beside the loop the front page draws in §5: firms in the boom investing in, buying from and selling to each other, so that one firm’s spending is another’s revenue. The front page already traces Amazon’s stake in Anthropic, Anthropic’s rent for computing capacity paid to SpaceX, and SpaceX’s purchases from Nvidia. These results add the supplier’s own money to the same loop. Nvidia earns revenue from the build-out while at the same time putting money into the firms doing the building. In a half-year in which it sold $177.8 billion, it put $42.4 billion into stakes in other companies: roughly 24 cents invested back into the boom for every dollar of revenue taken out of it. The release also names financing partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, meant to raise more than $500 billion of outside money for AI infrastructure. The release says these still depend on final agreements. Read the two together and they point the same way: the build-out is reaching beyond its builders’ own cash for money.
The interesting warning on the results call was not about demand. Management pointed to “extreme pricing conditions in memory” (memory chips, which Nvidia buys in) as a reason to rethink its growth guidance. It said the outlook for fiscal 2028 would be “a lot higher” without that supply limit. What holds Nvidia back is how much can be built, not how much can be sold. The chief financial officer put the cloud industry’s orders signed but not yet delivered at more than $2 trillion.
For this page’s arithmetic that cuts the wrong way. When supply is short, the builders pay more for each unit of computing power they install. Higher prices raise the capital bill without raising the revenue that has to pay for it. That means the revenue floor in §2, the revenue the AI spending must earn every year to pay for itself, moves up while the revenue that must clear it stays where it was.
Nvidia’s $96.2 billion quarter is not revenue from artificial intelligence. It is revenue from AI capital spending, which is a different thing and sits entirely inside the build-out. The front page’s revenue floor asks whether the sector can earn something like $1.3 to 1.5 trillion a year from customers outside the loop, whether from software budgets or from wages. Not one dollar of these results is evidence on that question, because every dollar came from a company that is itself spending ahead of its own AI revenue.
A record quarter at the supplier means the bill is growing, not that it is being paid. The reading says the build-out continues at full speed and the five have not flinched. It says nothing about who pays in the end, which is still the only question this site is asking.
Oracle’s first-quarter results for its 2027 fiscal year land around mid-September; Oracle is the only one of the five whose financial year is out of step with the calendar quarters. The August US jobs report, the other side of the ledger and the front page’s test of whether AI revenue and jobs are moving apart, arrives on 4 September. The five’s third-quarter results start around 20 October, when the spending Nvidia has just recorded shows up as their capital spending. Nvidia reports again in late November. Earlier this results season: Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, SpaceX.