Nvidia’s profit hits US$58.3 billion as AI boom gathers more steam

Published Thu, May 21, 2026 · 07:39 AM

[SAN FRANCISCO] Another huge quarterly profit announced by chipmaker Nvidia on Wednesday (May 20) provided solid evidence that Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence spending spree is still gathering steam.

Nvidia said that profit in its most recent quarter was US$58.3 billion, up 211 per cent from a year ago and topping expectations by financial analysts. Just three years ago, the Silicon Valley company’s quarterly profit was US$2 billion – about a 30th of what it is today.

Nvidia’s chips are an essential part of big AI projects, and other tech companies have been lining up to spend tens of billions of US dollars on those chips. Nvidia is now the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, and its financial results have become a bellwether for the rest of the tech industry.

Nvidia’s biggest problem appears to be meeting demand from its spendthrift tech industry customers, a strong indication that the AI boom is going strong. On Wednesday, the company said spending on AI infrastructure would reach US$3 trillion to US$4 trillion annually in 2030, up from about US$1 trillion today.

It was the second consecutive quarter that Nvidia’s profit had doubled, and the second time that the chip company had a bigger profit than other tech giants like Apple. Revenue for the quarter was US$81.6 billion, up 85 per cent from a year ago, also topping expectations.

Nvidia also reassured Wall Street about its future. The company projected sales in the current quarter would nearly double from last year to US$91 billion. That exceeded Wall Street’s prediction for sales of US$86 billion. Nvidia’s share price fell 1 per cent in aftermarket trading, giving up most of its gains from earlier in the day.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the construction of data centres, which he calls AI factories, had accelerated because “AI can now do productive and valuable work.”

“Demand has gone parabolic,” he said during a call with Wall Street analysts.

Nvidia’s sales have been buoyed by tech giants’ conviction that AI will start the next industrial revolution, and Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and others have committed at least US$1 trillion to AI data centre construction. Those data centres are packed with Nvidia chips.

Not surprisingly, data centre sales now drive Nvidia’s business. In the most recent quarter, the company said revenue from data centres rose 92 per cent to US$75 billion – nearly all of its sales for the period. NYTIMES