Nvidia smashes forecast despite China trade concerns

Jensen Huang decried export curbs but says he trusts Trump

Nvidia has beaten market expectations again with Q1 results. During the earnings call CEO Jensen Huang managed to both throw shade at China export curbs and pay homage to the “vision” of President Trump.

Nvidia smashed through sky high expectations of market analysts with its Q1 results, revealed last night, reporting nearly $44.1bn in revenue – a staggering 69 per cent jump year on year.

Shares rose nearly five per cent in after-hours trading as the firm posted a net income of $18.8bn, an increase of 26 per cent, with adjusted gross margins at 71.3 per cent.

This growth was provided in part by the company’s booming data centre business, which grew a genuinely staggering 73% year-on-year, delivering $39.1bn in revenue for the first quarter. Nvidia’s datacentre business now accounts for 88 per cent of total turnover.

Hyperscale cloud providers contributed almost half of the datacentre unit revenue. For example, Microsoft has deployed tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs and is expected to ramp up to hundreds of thousands, primarily due to OpenAI’s needs.

Nvidia’s networking arm which chains all these chips together, posted revenues of $5bn.

Even Nvidia's Gaming division is still growing steadily with revenue up 42 per cent year on year to $3.8bn.

Trust in Trump

Despite CEO Jensen Huang's bullish tone, the earnings call wasn’t unalloyed good news. The US export restriction implemented against the H20 chip last month dented revenues, albeit on a small scale. The company said it: “incurred a $4.5 billion charge in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 associated with H20 excess inventory and purchase obligations as the demand for H20 diminished.”

H20 sales in the first quarter were $4.5 billion but Nvidia was “unable to ship an additional $2.5 billion of H20 revenue” for the period. The export restriction also resulted in a loss of $8 billion in H20 sales for the second quarter, the company said.

CFO Collette Kress noted that:

“Although our H20 has been in the market for over a year and does not have a market outside of China, the new export controls on H20 did not provide a grace period to allow us to sell through our inventory.”

Huang cast shade on the export controls, complaining that the $50 billion China market is effectively closed to the industry. However, Huang took care not to sound too negative about the administration, praising Trump's “bold vision to reshore advanced manufacturing, create jobs and strengthen national security,” whilst noting the investment Nvidia is making with partners to build its capacity to manufacture in the US.

“We’ve made substantial, long-term purchase commitments, a deep investment in America’s AI manufacturing future,” he said.

Huang also lauded Trump for scrapping the Biden era rule which limited exports of advanced chips to other countries. He said:

“President Trump wants America to win, and he also realizes that that we’re not the only country in the race. And he wants [the] United States to win and recognizes that we have to get the American [AI computing] stack out to the world and have the world build on top of American stacks instead of alternatives,” he said.