The company of all records, NVIDIA seems to be moving further and further away from its original success.
Quarter after quarter, fiscal result after fiscal result, NVIDIA continues to break its own records and crush the rest of the world's tech companies. And its boss can smile, because with the closing of its fiscal year 2026, NVIDIA has just smashed yet another record. Jensen Huang is now at the head of a company that generated a whopping $68.1 billion in sales in the fourth quarter of this year alone. That's an increase of 73% on the fourth quarter of the previous year! What's more, this increase in sales was accompanied by a rise in net income, albeit slightly lower, but also a record: up 63% year-on-year to $43 billion!
Evolution and distribution of NVIDIA revenues between 2021 and 2026 © App Economy Insights
On the occasion of the conference call organized to coincide with the publication of these results, NVIDIA and its CEO logically returned to the origins of these exceptional results. You don't have to look very far: this prodigy can be summed up in two words: artificial intelligence. " The adoption of agents by businesses is growing by leaps and bounds. Our customers are rushing to invest in AI computing," says Jensen Huang. " The demand for tokens around the world has become exponential. I think we can all see it: even our six-year-old GPUs in the cloud are saturated, and prices are rising," he continued. AI, AI and more AI, but what about NVIDIA's core business, what the company started out with in the 90s?
NVIDIA began as a company specializing in GPUs for gamers. A field that has enabled the company to get to where it is today, but which no longer carries much weight alongside the gigantic orders for GPUs for data centers. App Economy Insights has produced a remarkable infographic to get a glimpse of the tipping point in NVIDIA's structure: during the 4ᵉ fiscal quarter of 2021, gaming had generated sales of $2.5 billion when data centers provided "only" $1.9 billion. Five years on, the same is no longer true: while gaming has made good progress - $3.7 billion, an increase of almost 50% - sales generated by data centers stand at... $62.3 billion!
In detail, breakdown of NVIDIA's 4ᵉ fiscal quarter 2026 © App Economy Insights
The second infographic published by App Economy Insights comes to slice up the NVIDIA cake of this fourth quarter 2026. This makes it easier to understand what Colette Kress, the group's CFO, said on the conference call: " We expect supply constraints to be the main drag on the video game sector in Q1 and beyond." So there's no question of anticipating any reversal in demand: it's really NVIDIA that won't be able to satisfy this demand from gamers for GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards. That said, we can understand Jensen Huang's firm: why direct part of production towards far less profitable gaming GPUs when data centers have an appetite that seems limitless?
