On May 20, 2026, NVIDIA reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% year over year and up 20% sequentially from a record Q4 — and quietly retired the five-segment scoreboard (Data Center, Gaming, Professional Visualization, Automotive, OEM & Other) that investors have used to read the company for a decade. In its place: two "market platforms," Data Center and Edge Computing. Net income hit $58.3 billion, the board tripled the quarterly dividend from a penny to a quarter, and NVIDIA authorized another $80 billion in buybacks. But roughly a quarter of that net income came not from selling chips — it came from marking up the company's own investment portfolio.
The Headline Numbers
| Metric | Q1 FY2027 | Q1 FY2026 | YoY | Q4 FY2026 | QoQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $81,615M | $44,062M | +85% | $68,127M | +20% |
| Gross profit | $61,157M | $26,668M | +129% | $51,093M | +20% |
| Operating income | $53,536M | $21,638M | +147% | — | — |
| Net income | $58,321M | $18,775M | +211% | $44,314M | +32% |
| Diluted EPS | $2.39 | $0.76 | +214% | $1.76 | +36% |
Net income grew faster than revenue for the second straight comparison, and faster than operating income too — the first hint that something other than chip sales is doing extra work in the profit line this quarter (more on that below). Revenue itself needs no asterisk: $81.6 billion in ninety days is a record for any semiconductor company, and it came almost entirely from one place.
Revenue Deep Dive: The New Scoreboard
Starting this quarter, NVIDIA stopped breaking out Gaming, Professional Visualization, Automotive, and OEM & Other as separate lines. Everything that isn't Data Center now rolls into a single "Edge Computing" platform — a genuine change to how the company organizes itself, not just a labeling exercise, but one that also has the effect of making the shrinking non-AI side of the business much harder to track quarter to quarter.
| Platform | Q1 FY2027 | % of Revenue | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data Center | $75,246M | 92.2% | +92% |
| — Compute | $60,400M | 74.0% | +77% |
| — Networking | $14,800M | 18.1% | +199% |
| Edge Computing | $6,369M | 7.8% | +29% |
Data Center alone is now larger than the entire company was a year ago ($44.1B in Q1 FY2026). Compute — the GPUs that train and run large models — is still the bulk of it, but Networking is the standout: NVLink fabric and switching revenue nearly tripled year over year as customers build out multi-rack, multi-GPU clusters rather than buying accelerators as standalone boxes. That shift, from selling chips to selling the fabric that connects thousands of them, is arguably the more durable story than the headline compute number.
Edge Computing — PCs, consoles, workstations, robotics, automotive — grew a respectable 29%, but at $6.4 billion it's now a rounding error next to Data Center. For comparison, this same collection of businesses (Gaming + Pro Viz + Automotive + OEM) generated $4.95 billion in Q1 FY2026, so the growth is real, just structurally dwarfed. No shipments of Data Center Hopper products to China occurred this quarter, versus $4.6 billion a year earlier — the export-control drag that hit results in FY2026 is now fully in the year-over-year base rather than a live headwind.
The Margin Story
| Metric | FY2024 | FY2025 | FY2026 | Q1 FY2027 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gross margin | 72.7% | 75.0% | 71.1% | 74.9% |
| Operating margin | 54.1% | 62.4% | 60.4% | 65.6% |
| Net margin | 48.8% | 55.8% | 55.6% | 71.4% |
Gross margin is back near its FY2025 peak after dipping in FY2026 (when a $4.5 billion H20 inventory charge from U.S. export restrictions dragged the full-year number down). Operating margin at 65.6% is the highest of any period in this table — R&D and SG&A grew much more slowly than revenue, which is what operating leverage is supposed to look like at this scale. Net margin, though, is the outlier: 71.4% is far above anything operating margin alone would produce, and that gap is the whole story of this quarter.
The One Big Question: How Much of $58.3B Is Actually From Selling Chips?
Operating income was $53.5 billion. Net income was $58.3 billion. Net income exceeding operating income is unusual for any company, and the reason here is a single line: "Other income (expense), net" of $15.9 billion, up from a $180 million loss in the same quarter last year. NVIDIA's CFO commentary attributes this primarily to gains on non-marketable and publicly-held equity securities — the company has spent the last two years investing billions into AI infrastructure and startup partners (it disclosed $13.0 billion into Groq-related and other private investments during FY2026 alone), and this quarter those stakes were marked up sharply.
That $15.9 billion isn't cash from operations, and it isn't repeatable on demand — it's a paper gain on a portfolio, subject to reversing just as fast if valuations move the other way. Strip it out and pretax income falls to roughly $54.0 billion, income tax of $11.6 billion is unchanged, and "core" net income lands closer to $42.4 billion — still up dramatically from $18.8 billion a year ago, but a very different growth rate than the headline $58.3 billion suggests. Investors modeling NVIDIA off trailing net income should know they're baking in an increasingly large and increasingly volatile investment-gains line, not just chip demand.
Tracking an $81.6B Quarter in Plain Text
Every number above should tie back to a real transaction, not just a press-release summary — that's the whole point of modeling NVIDIA's filings in Beancount, a plain-text double-entry accounting format: every debit has a matching credit, so the books either balance or they visibly don't. In this ledger, Income postings are negative (credit) and Expense postings are positive (debit):
2026-04-26 * "Q1 FY2027 Revenue" "Data Center"
Assets:Current:Accounts-Receivable 75,246,000,000.00 USD
Income:Data-Center -75,246,000,000.00 USD
2026-04-26 * "Q1 FY2027 Revenue" "Edge Computing"
Assets:Current:Accounts-Receivable 6,369,000,000.00 USD
Income:Edge-Computing -6,369,000,000.00 USD
2026-04-26 * "Q1 FY2027 Income" "Other income, net (primarily non-marketable and publicly-held equity securities gains)"
Assets:Current:Cash-And-Equivalents 15,929,000,000.00 USD
Income:Other-Income-Expense -15,929,000,000.00 USDThe balance sheet tells its own version of the AI-buildout story. Property and equipment — NVIDIA's own data center and lab infrastructure — has grown from $3.9 billion at the end of FY2024 to $12.4 billion just one quarter into FY2027, more than tripling as the company builds out the capacity to develop and validate its own next-generation silicon:
2026-04-27 balance Assets:NonCurrent:Property-Plant-Equipment 12,403,000,000.00 USD
2026-04-27 balance Assets:NonCurrent:Deferred-Income-Taxes 11,707,000,000.00 USDRebuilding this ledger for this post also surfaced a real bug worth naming plainly: the prior quarters' balance-sheet entries had been re-adding each year's opening figures on top of what the previous year's transactions already accumulated, doubling the books at every fiscal-year boundary — cumulative assets had drifted to a fictional $384 billion against NVIDIA's real $206.8 billion by the FY2026 close. That's now fixed with pad/balance directives checked against the actual 10-K filings for FY2024 through FY2026, so every historical figure in the embedded ledger below reconciles to the audited numbers, not just this quarter's.
The Multi-Year Arc
| Fiscal Year | Revenue | Gross Margin | Net Income | PP&E (year-end) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2024 | $60,922M | 72.7% | $29,760M | $3,914M |
| FY2025 | $130,497M | 75.0% | $72,880M | $6,283M |
| FY2026 | $215,938M | 71.1% | $120,067M | $10,383M |
| Q1 FY2027 (quarter) | $81,615M | 74.9% | $58,321M | $12,403M |
Three fiscal years, three-and-a-half-fold revenue growth, and net income compounding even faster than revenue for most of that stretch. Annualizing Q1 FY2027 alone (not a forecast, just arithmetic) implies a run rate north of $326 billion — a figure that would have sounded absurd about Data Center chips as recently as FY2024, when the whole company did $60.9 billion for the year. The PP&E line is the tell for what NVIDIA thinks comes next: it isn't just selling the shovels for the AI gold rush anymore, it's building its own mine.
The Verdict: Bull vs. Bear
Bull Case
- Data Center Networking revenue nearly tripled YoY — customers are buying NVIDIA's fabric, not just its chips, which is a stickier, harder-to-substitute purchase.
- Operating margin (65.6%) hit a series high, showing real operating leverage rather than margin expansion purely from mix.
- $38.5 billion remained under the buyback authorization even after a record $19.3 billion in repurchases this quarter, and the board just added another $80 billion — management isn't short of capital or confidence.
- The China Hopper headwind that dented FY2026 is now fully in the prior-year comparison base, not a live drag on results.
- Guidance of $91.0 billion for Q2 FY2027 implies continued double-digit sequential growth even off an $81.6 billion base.
Bear Case
- $15.9 billion of this quarter's $58.3 billion net income came from investment-portfolio gains, not chip sales — a volatile, non-repeatable line that flatters the headline growth rate.
- Dropping the Gaming/Pro Viz/Automotive/OEM breakout removes years of comparability just as those businesses' relative weight was shrinking fastest — investors lose visibility right when it would be most useful.
- 92% of revenue now comes from one platform (Data Center); any slowdown in AI capex from hyperscalers concentrates directly into NVIDIA's income statement.
- Non-marketable and publicly-held equity securities are now a large, illiquid balance-sheet position ($43.4 billion) — a real exposure if those private AI valuations correct.
- Guidance explicitly assumes zero Data Center compute revenue from China — a policy-dependent variable NVIDIA doesn't control.
Our Take: The chip business is genuinely as strong as the headline suggests — Networking growth and expanding operating margin are real, structural, and not accounting artifacts. But the $58.3 billion net-income figure is not a clean read on the core business this quarter, and the segment-reporting change makes it slightly harder, not easier, to verify that going forward. Judge NVIDIA on operating income and the Data Center growth rate; treat "Other income, net" as noise until it proves otherwise.