Nvidia delivers another quarter of stellar growth amid growing concern
over AI economy
[February 26, 2026] By
MICHAEL LIEDTKE
Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on Wednesday announced another
quarter of astounding quarterly growth as investors try to decipher
whether technology’s latest craze is overblown hyperbole or a
springboard into a new era of prosperity and productivity.
The results for the November-January period blew past the analyst
projections that shape investors’ perceptions, as has been the case
since Nvidia’s high-end chips emerged as AI’s best building blocks three
years ago.
Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue surged 73% from the previous year
to $68.1 billion while its profit nearly doubled to roughly $43 billion,
or $1.76 per share.
“No quarter has had more riding on it than this one,” said Jake Behan,
head of capital markets for the investment firm Direxion. “The AI trade
needed some positive news and Nvidia’s earnings report brought plenty of
it.”
The Santa Clara, California, company also provided a forecast exceeding
analyst projections while its CEO Jensen Huang reinforced the demand for
the company's chips is still “skyrocketing." That description feeds into
Huang's thesis that the AI boom is still in the early stages of a
buildout that will reshape society. If Nvidia hits its revenue target
for the February-April period, it will translate into a 77% increase
from last year — a sign that the company's already phenomenal growth
rate is still accelerating.
“AI is here, AI is not going to go back,” Huang said during a conference
call with analysts. “AI is only going to only get better from here.”
Despite the stellar results and still-rosy outlook, many investors still
evidently are worried about a jarring comedown after a three-year boom
that has seen Nvidia's market value soar from $400 billion at the end of
2022 to nearly $4.8 trillion now. After initially rising 4% in extended
trading after the latest quarterly numbers came out, Nvidia's stock
price backtracked and was slightly down following Huang's upbeat
conference call.
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A sign to a Nvidia office building is shown in Santa Clara, Calif.,
Wednesday, May 31, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
 Nvidia has regularly cleared the bar
set by analysts in the past three years, often by a wide margin, but
that hasn’t always been enough to satisfy investors who have become
increasingly skeptical about whether AI will justify the trillions
of dollars that are being spent to develop the technology.
After Nvidia delivered a stellar performance that far exceeded
analyst forecasts in its last quarterly report, its stock price
still fell by 3% during the next day’s trading.
The AI fervor has escalated again during the past month as the four
companies leading the AI charge — Amazon, Microsoft, Google parent
Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta Platforms — collectively made
commitments to spend about $650 billion this year ramping up their
AI computing power.
A significant amount of the money is expected to be earmarked to buy
more Nvidia chips required to power their AI factories, just as has
been the case for much of the past three years — as Nvidia's annual
revenue soared from $27 billion to $216 billion. Analysts expect the
chipmaker's revenue to surpass $330 billion during the company's
next fiscal year, a more than 50% increase from the past year.
“We want to take the great opportunity that we have as we’re in the
beginning of this new computing era, this new computing platform
shift, to put everybody on Nvidia,” Huang said.
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