Nvidia CFO says about half of its data center business comes from customers beyond hyperscalers
Fortune Sheryl Estrada ● Covered by 3 sources
Nvidia says about half its data center business now comes from customers outside the big cloud giants. That’s its answer to the AI-bubble talk: demand is spreading, not shrinking.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Sheryl Estrada — read the original for the full story.
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Nvidia’s latest quarter was a monster by almost any measure. Revenue hit $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year earlier and above analyst estimates. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $2.22, and data center revenue reached $89.0 billion, up 117% year over year. The company also guided for $105.8 billion to $110.1 billion in fiscal third-quarter sales and said it expects fiscal 2028 annual sales to rise 70% from the prior year.
That kind of growth is exactly why the stock keeps dragging the AI debate back into the open. Bulls see proof that spending is still raging. Skeptics see a market trying very hard to justify itself. Jensen Huang tried to keep the focus on momentum, saying demand is accelerating.
The more interesting argument came from CFO Colette Kress. She pushed back on the idea that Nvidia lives or dies by the same handful of hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. Her point was that growth is broadening out, with sovereign programs, regional NeoClouds, enterprise edge systems and air-gapped data centers set to make up roughly half of the data center business.
The split matters. Nvidia said $49 billion of its data center revenue came from hyperscalers, up 13% sequentially, while the rest came from what it calls ACI&E customers, which Kress grouped under “AICE” in her remarks. In plain English: the company wants investors to stop thinking about one giant capex loop and start thinking about a wider web of buyers.
Kress also leaned on the startup side of the story. She said the Nvidia-based AI-native startup ecosystem is scaling rapidly, and pointed to global VC funding in AI exceeding $400 billion in the first half of 2026, with roughly 70% of that spent on compute. She added that nearly 20 companies, including Cursor, owned by SpaceX, Figma and Together AI, now exceed $1 billion in annualized run-rate revenue, up from 13 in the fourth quarter of last year. Vertical enterprise software was the fastest-growing category.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of report Nvidia needs: not just bigger numbers, but a broader customer base. The AI story gets less fragile when it’s not hanging on four or five hyperscalers doing all the buying. Also, if every bubble defense boils down to “look, more people are spending,” that’s not subtle — but it is effective.
Read more about this at: Fortune