Nvidia’s AI Boom Breaks Records, but Supply and Financing Risks Loom

Nvidia’s AI Boom Breaks Records, but Supply and Financing Risks Loom
Nvidia has delivered another AI-era blowout, putting a $100 billion quarterly revenue mark within reach. The catch is that demand is running faster than the supply chain—and critics remain uneasy about how the boom is being financed.

For the quarter ended July 26, Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in revenue, up 106% from a year earlier, with data-center sales reaching $89 billion. Chief executive Jensen Huang framed the surge as a turning point: “AI has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work.”

After the market closed Wednesday, the company raised the stakes with an unusual year-ahead outlook: roughly 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028, far ahead of analyst expectations. It projected $108 billion in revenue for the next quarter, plus or minus 2%, a figure that would make Nvidia a $100-billion-a-quarter company for the first time. Shares rose about 4% in after-hours trading after initially wavering on the results.

The optimism came with a blunt admission. Huang said Nvidia can currently supply about 70% of demand from existing customers, while its “entire supply chain is challenged” and running at full tilt. Memory and component shortages are also pushing up costs, including for consumer GPUs, even as the data-center business dwarfs Nvidia’s gaming and edge-computing operations.

Management also used the call to rebut concerns that its investments, guarantees and capacity deals with AI customers amount to circular financing. CFO Colette Kress said the company sees backing frontier AI labs as limited-risk support for businesses whose growth is constrained by compute, not demand. Skeptics, however, point to Nvidia’s expanding exposure as a vulnerability if the AI spending cycle cools.

By Thursday, the earnings beat had lifted U.S. futures even as Asian stock markets traded mixed. Elon Musk, meanwhile, amplified research arguing that official U.S. GDP figures miss much of Nvidia’s economic contribution and may have understated growth by about 0.3 percentage points over the past year.

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