NVIDIA Q4 FY2026 Earnings: $68B Quarter Signals AI Infrastructure Acceleration

NVIDIA reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue of $68.1 billion on February 26, beating guidance by roughly $3 billion and marking a 73% year-over-year increase. Data center revenue hit $62.3 billion, representing over 91% of total sales. For the full fiscal year, NVIDIA generated $215.9 billion in revenue and $120.1 billion in net income. Here is what the numbers mean for the AI supply chain.

The Numbers

Supply Chain Read-Through

In Early Signal's 10-layer framework, NVIDIA sits at Layer 3 (Chips & Accelerators). These results carry direct implications for multiple layers of the AI supply chain:

Layer 2 — Semiconductor Manufacturing. NVIDIA's supply-related commitments nearly doubled from $50.3 billion in Q3 to $95.2 billion in Q4, signaling aggressive inventory build-out extending well beyond the next several quarters. TSMC and advanced packaging providers are direct beneficiaries of this demand pull.

Layer 4 — Infrastructure. Networking revenue of $11.0 billion, up 263% year-over-year, reflects the explosive growth in data center interconnect demand as clusters scale to tens of thousands of GPUs. This benefits networking specialists and power/cooling infrastructure providers.

Layers 5–6 — Cloud & AI Platforms. CEO Jensen Huang highlighted that enterprise adoption of AI agents is "skyrocketing," driving exponential compute demand. The hyperscalers remain the primary channel: strategic partnerships with Meta, Anthropic, AWS, and Microsoft Azure were explicitly called out.

Downstream (Layers 7–10). Huang framed the AI economy directly: "In this new world of AI, compute is revenues. Without compute, there's no way to generate tokens." This signals that downstream application and transformation layers will continue to invest in infrastructure as they monetize AI capabilities.

Margin and Profitability

Gross margins held at 75.0% GAAP despite the Blackwell ramp, beating guidance of 74.8%. The company is targeting mid-70s gross margins for fiscal 2027, signaling confidence in premium pricing power even as competition intensifies. Operating cash flow for fiscal 2026 reached $102.7 billion with $96.6 billion in free cash flow, and the company returned $41.1 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends.

Forward Outlook

NVIDIA guided Q1 FY2027 revenue to $78.0 billion (plus or minus 2%), implying continued sequential acceleration. Two product announcements shape the medium-term picture:

• Blackwell Ultra — 50x performance improvement and 35x lower cost for agentic AI workloads, arriving to sustain demand through the current product cycle.
• Rubin Platform — next-generation architecture promising 10x inference cost reduction versus Blackwell, extending NVIDIA's roadmap visibility.

Notably, the guidance assumes no China data center compute revenue, meaning the $78 billion target is achievable without a resolution to export restrictions.

Signal Impact

The combination of a revenue beat, margin expansion, and aggressive forward guidance reinforces bullish signals across the upstream layers of the AI supply chain. Within our signal framework, the quarterly component — which tracks revenue acceleration, margin trends, and capex shifts — receives the strongest positive input from this report. The $95.2 billion in supply commitments is a leading indicator for Layer 1–2 momentum over the coming quarters.

The downstream read is more nuanced: if hyperscaler capex continues to accelerate, that is bullish for cloud platforms but may compress margins for pure-play application companies competing for compute allocation. Our risk framework monitors this dynamic through cross-layer propagation signals.

Browse NVIDIA's position in the AI ecosystem universe and track real-time signal changes on the signal dashboard.