Tech giant Nvidia reported its fiscal second quarter earnings on Wednesday, with revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year and above analyst estimates. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $2.22, while Data Center revenue reached $89.0 billion, up 117% year over year.

The company also issued Q3 guidance of $105.8–$110.1 billion and forecast fiscal 2028 annual sales to increase 70% from the prior year.

“Demand is accelerating,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a statement.

The results reignited debate over whether AI spending is sustainable and gave both bulls and Nvidia itself new evidence for continued growth.

“This was a masterpiece quarter with stunning guidance that speaks to the massive demand Nvidia is seeing in the AI Revolution,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives, told me. “The guidance for next quarter was well ahead of whisper numbers, and this will be a spark that is a boost for tech stocks and the broader sector.”

During the earnings call, CFO Colette Kress offered a data-driven rebuttal to the AI-bubble narrative. Rather than simply asserting that demand is durable, Kress argued that Nvidia’s growth is increasingly diversified beyond hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

“Hyperscalers will remain a major growth driver, but non-hyperscaler growth, our AICE segment, spanning sovereign, regional NeoClouds, enterprise edge and air-gap data centers, will represent roughly half of our data center business,” Kress said.

That $89 billion in Data Center revenue splits into $49 billion from hyperscalers, up 13% sequentially, and what Nvidia calls ACI&E — enterprise, industrial and NeoCloud customers, which Kress’s quote groups under “AICE.”

This means Nvidia’s fortunes aren’t solely tied to four or five Big Tech capex budgets. They’re increasingly spread across sovereign AI programs, regional cloud providers, corporate deployments, and air-gapped or edge systems.

“Our AI-native start-up ecosystem developed and running primarily on the Nvidia compute platform is scaling at a rapid pace,” Kress said. The wave of companies built on Nvidia’s platform is now a meaningful demand source in its own right.

She backed that up with hard numbers: “Global VC funding in AI, roughly 70% of which is spent on compute, exceeded $400 billion in the first half of 2026, surpassing the $265 billion raised in all of 2025.” Kress’s point is that much of those venture dollars ultimately flow back to GPU purchases or cloud rental, benefiting Nvidia.

Another proof point was naming actual Nvidia clients. “Nearly 20 companies, including Cursor, owned by SpaceX, Figma and Together AI, now exceed $1 billion in annualized run-rate revenue, up from 13 companies in Q4 of last year, with vertical enterprise software logging the fastest growth,” she said.

The fact that vertical enterprise software is the fastest-growing category signals that AI adoption is moving from experimentation into embedded, revenue-generating business software.

“Jensen and Nvidia help put to rest some concerns about financing and balance sheet issues that have been an overhang on the tech sector and capex cycle buildout for the hyperscalers,” Ives said. He added that the demand and metrics “were off the charts” and speak to an acceleration in AI spending. “The yields/debt issue is not going away, but this shows monetization is happening quicker than expected,” he noted.

Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Mike Bruff is stepping down as CFO of Envision, a national medical group and physician-staffing company, to pursue an opportunity in the technology industry, effective Sept. 30. Envision has formed an Office of the CFO led by president and CEO Jason Owen, with Holly Jensen, SVP and chief accounting officer, and Jeffrey O'Brien, treasurer and SVP of investor relations and risk management, to support the transition. The company is conducting a search for a permanent CFO.

Tim S. Ledwick has been named CFO of New America Acquisition I Corp. (NYSE: NWAX), special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), effective Aug. 26. He succeeds George O'Leary, who resigned as CFO the same day; the company said the departure wasn't the result of any disagreement over operations, policies or practices. Ledwick brings more than three decades of senior finance leadership, including his current role as CFO of Dominari Holdings Inc., plus prior stints at SYFT, Dictaphone Corporation, Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and Cross Media Marketing Corp.

Big Deal

Ally Bank's new "Cost of Life Today" report finds that Americans are still prioritizing joy despite financial strain, but many struggle to afford it comfortably. Built on a proprietary "Joy Index" scored across affordability, importance, experience and resiliency, the national average lands at 54.2 out of 100, which places the typical U.S. adult in "Joy Pressured" territory.

Nearly 8 in 10 consumers say they experience joy at least monthly, yet only 15% say it's easy to afford, and 72% feel at least some guilt spending on joy instead of other financial goals, with that guilt notably more pronounced among women (75%) than men (68%).

Gen Z stands out as an exception to generational patterns: despite lower earning power, half fall into the top two Joy Index bands—ahead of millennials and Gen X—driven by the highest joy-spending frequency and the highest rate of dedicated "joy budgets" of any generation, at 56%.

When budgets tighten, the report finds consumers protect relationships, rest and personal growth first, cutting material purchases and discretionary splurges before anything tied to connection or well-being.

Going deeper

"Google DeepMind is losing its grip on elite AI talent, new data shows" is a Fortune report by Beatrice Nolan. 

Nolan writes: "The allure of life-changing paychecks has resulted in elite researchers swapping between rival labs at dizzying speed. Google DeepMind, which was once the leading destination for many of those researchers—especially in Europe—is now finding itself on the losing side of that contest, according to a new overview of the flow of engineering talent exclusively shared with Fortune. Read more here.

Overheard

"The irony is that a world redesigned for machines may eventually allow us to recover something more purely human."

—George C. Lee II, co-head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, writes in a Fortune opinion piece.