The original Convert URL stub on this permalink got the most important number backwards. Nvidia did not *guide* to revenue “near $96 billion” for the third quarter. It *printed* $96.2 billion of revenue in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, the three months ended July 26, 2026. The outlook that actually moved the tape was $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, for the current quarter — and a preliminary comment that fiscal 2028 revenue could still grow about 70% even with supply remaining tight. That is a different story than a beat-and-raise on a $96 billion print. Size the position off the actual print, not the leftover headline.
What the company actually reported
NVIDIA’s own release is the source of record, not a finance homepage. Revenue was $96.221 billion, up 18% from the prior quarter and 106% from $46.743 billion a year earlier. Data Center was $89.0 billion, up 117% year over year. GAAP diluted EPS was $2.46; non-GAAP diluted EPS was $2.22. Gross margin was 75.0% on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis.
Net income on a GAAP basis was $59.688 billion, up 126% from a year earlier. That line is not “pure” chip profit. Nvidia’s cash-flow statement shows $7.771 billion of gains from equity securities in the quarter. The AFP write-up on Yahoo Finance put the investment-gain figure at $7.8 billion and quoted CFO Colette Kress addressing the circular-financing complaint directly: “We recognize the scale of this support (to these companies), and we know some will call this circular financing. We see it differently.” CEO Jensen Huang’s line was simpler: “The only regret that I have is that I didn’t invest more and sooner.”
The company returned about $26.0 billion to shareholders in the quarter through buybacks and the cash dividend. Next quarterly dividend is $0.25 per share, payable October 1, 2026, to holders of record September 10. Remaining repurchase authorization: about $99.0 billion.
Operating cash flow was $24.077 billion. Free cash flow, as Nvidia defines it, was $21.341 billion. Cash and cash equivalents ended at $22.443 billion. Marketable equity securities sat at $42.783 billion. Non-marketable securities were $51.157 billion, up from $22.251 billion at the January 25, 2026 fiscal year-end. Long-term debt jumped to $32.366 billion from $7.469 billion. Those last two lines are the balance-sheet story the cheerleaders skip.
The outlook, and what it is not
Guidance for the third quarter of fiscal 2027: revenue $108.0 billion plus or minus 2%, with no Data Center compute revenue from China assumed. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin guided to 74.0%, plus or minus 50 basis points. Operating expenses guided to about $9.2 billion GAAP / $9.0 billion non-GAAP.
Zacks, syndicating on Yahoo Finance, said the Q3 revenue call sat above a $102 billion consensus it cited, and that management’s fiscal 2028 “roughly 70%” growth comment sat well ahead of a Zacks projection of $553.24 billion, or 42% growth. Yahoo’s AFP piece said analysts had been looking for roughly $92 billion of Q2 revenue. Those are other people’s models. The company’s own numbers are the ones above.
On the product cycle, Zacks reported that Vera Rubin production shipments had begun, that Nvidia said it already had purchase orders from every major hyperscaler, AI cloud provider, and system OEM, and that management expects Vera Rubin to be about 20% of Data Center revenue in Q3. Nvidia’s own release said Vera Rubin is “ramping into full production” with racks at CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Nebius. Treat “fastest ramp in company history” as a management claim, not a measured fact.
Zacks also reported the margin path management described on the call: 75% in Q2, about 74% in Q3, a trough of 71%–72% in Q4 as memory costs rise, then a settle around 72%–73% in fiscal 2028. The official outlook only locks the next quarter at 74.0% plus or minus 50 bps. Do not round the rest into a guarantee.
Circular money and $500 billion of “independent” capital
Nvidia announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR “to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for the buildout of AI infrastructure over time, subject to definitive agreements.” That last clause is doing real work. A press-release intention is not a closed fund. Supply and capacity commitments, per Zacks citing the company, jumped from $119 billion last quarter to about $279 billion. That is Nvidia locking wafers and memory, not a free option on AI.
The financing complaint is not a conspiracy theory. When the vendor takes equity in the customer and the customer buys the vendor’s GPUs, the revenue is real until it is not. Kress called it a platform shift. A California reader who already owns NVDA in a taxable brokerage account should hear it as concentration risk: the same names (OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, xAI, Google-parent Alphabet, Meta) sit on both sides of the ledger.
What it means in California, and the caveats
Nvidia is a Santa Clara company. A large share of the people reading this either work in the same ecosystem, hold NVDA in a 401(k), or both. That is not diversification. A single-name position that has already done the decade’s work does not get bigger because the print was clean. California taxes realized capital gains as ordinary income. Chasing an 8% Thursday bounce — Yahoo Finance’s live tape had Nvidia up about 8% on August 27 after an initial after-hours pop of nearly 5% — is how you donate a short-term gain to Franchise Tax Board.
China is a hole in the guide, not a rounding error. Nvidia said it is assuming zero Data Center compute sales into China in the $108 billion outlook. Limited H200 shipments to names such as ByteDance and Tencent, as reported by AFP, are a political residual, not a second engine.
Gross margin is rolling over from a high base because memory is scarce. If you bought the “75% forever” story, you were not reading the call.
This is one quarter, one guide, and a stock that still prices Nvidia as the bottleneck. It is educational commentary, not investment advice, and it is not a Protected Wheel entry signal. If the four entry rules on concentration, trend, liquidity, and defined risk are not met, there is no trade.
Source: NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Second Quarter Fiscal 2027 (company release, Aug. 26, 2026); Nvidia doubles revenue, forecasts even more AI spending (AFP via Yahoo Finance); Nvidia Stock Soars After Q2 Earnings: Is NVDA Still a Buy? (Zacks via Yahoo Finance).
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