Nvidia just delivered another blockbuster quarter. The chipmaker reported $81.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 on May 20, 2026, up 85% from a year earlier and roughly 3% above Wall Street consensus, according to the company’s own press release.
Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $1.87, beating the $1.76 analysts had penciled in. Data Center revenue, the engine of the AI buildout, hit a record $75.2 billion, a 92% jump year over year. Non-GAAP gross margin held at 75%, in line with the prior quarter.
The reaction on Wall Street was immediate. Within 48 hours of the report, at least a dozen sell-side desks lifted their 12-month price targets on NVDA, with the most aggressive call now sitting near $413 a share — roughly 90% above the recent quote near $214.
The earnings beat in numbers
Three data points stood out in the print.
- Revenue acceleration: Q1 marked the third straight quarter of italicoaccelerating/italico year-over-year growth and the fourteenth consecutive quarter of sequential growth.
- Data Center dominance: At $75.2 billion in a single quarter, Nvidia’s Data Center business is now larger than the entire annual revenue of most S&P 500 technology peers. Blackwell-architecture GPUs remain the primary growth driver, and Nvidia also unveiled the next-generation NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform during the quarter.
- Shareholder returns: Nvidia returned a record $20 billion to shareholders during the quarter through buybacks and dividends. The board also approved an additional $80 billion share repurchase authorization and raised the quarterly dividend from $0.01 to $0.25 per share — a 25-fold increase.
Guidance was the other piece. For the second quarter of fiscal 2027, Nvidia expects revenue of $91 billion, plus or minus 2% — and crucially, that figure italicoexcludes/italico any Data Center compute shipments to China, which remain restricted under U.S. export controls.
What Wall Street is saying now
The wave of post-earnings revisions painted a clear bullish picture. Below is a snapshot of the most notable target-price moves, compiled from analyst notes circulating between May 20 and May 23, 2026.
| Analyst | Firm | New PT | Old PT | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mark Lipacis | Evercore ISI | $413 | $352 | Outperform |
| Cody Acree | Benchmark | $335 | $250 | Buy |
| Harlan Sur | JPMorgan | $280 | $265 | Overweight |
| Team coverage | UBS | $280 | — | Buy |
The consensus 12-month price target across Wall Street analysts covering NVDA now sits near $300, according to data aggregated by MarketBeat and TipRanks — implying upside of roughly 40% from the current quote. The most bearish targets on the Street still cluster above $200, meaning even the cautious camp does not see significant downside in the next 12 months.
For context on where Nvidia fits in the broader AI trade, money.it has previously profiled the 15 AI stocks Morgan Stanley considers core holdings, with NVDA at the top of that list.
Why analysts are willing to pay up
Three structural arguments keep getting recycled in the bull notes.
First, Blackwell ramp visibility. Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture — the successor to Hopper — is now in full production, with the next-generation Vera Rubin platform already announced. Management has consistently described GPU demand as outpacing supply, and hyperscaler capex commitments from Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Alphabet for calendar 2026 collectively exceed $300 billion, according to public guidance. Nvidia captures the dominant share of the GPU spend inside that envelope.
Second, margin durability. A 75% gross margin on a hardware business is virtually unheard of. The bear case has long held that competition from AMD’s MI series and custom silicon (Google’s TPU, Amazon’s Trainium, Meta’s MTIA) would compress that margin. So far, it has not. CUDA’s software moat and the cost of retraining models on non-Nvidia silicon continue to keep customers locked in.
Third, sovereign AI demand. Beyond the U.S. hyperscalers, Nvidia is now booking multi-billion-dollar orders from national governments — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France and India — building domestic AI compute capacity. CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly framed sovereign AI as a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue opportunity through fiscal 2028.
The risks bulls are downplaying
It is not all clear sky. Two risks deserve a sober read.
The China question is unresolved. U.S. export controls effectively zero out a market that, before restrictions, represented roughly 20-25% of Data Center revenue. Q2 guidance already strips that out, but any escalation — or, conversely, a partial reopening — would move the next print materially in either direction.
Valuation is the other one. At $214, NVDA trades at roughly 30 times forward earnings, well above its five-year average. The stock is not cheap on traditional metrics; the bull case is entirely a growth-and-margin durability call. Investors looking to size their AI exposure without concentration risk may want to consider broad-tech alternatives — money.it has surveyed three S&P 500 ETFs that explicitly exclude the Magnificent 7 for exactly that reason.
Bottom line
Nvidia’s Q1 fiscal 2027 print did everything the bulls needed it to do: it confirmed the Blackwell ramp, defended the 75% gross margin, and pushed forward guidance well above consensus. Wall Street responded with a near-universal lift in price targets, capped by Evercore ISI’s $413 call. The base case among major banks now points to roughly 40% upside in 12 months; the bull case approaches 90%.
For investors who already own the stock, the analyst commentary supports the thesis. For those still on the sidelines weighing an entry, money.it maintains a step-by-step guide on how to buy Nvidia stock, including the brokerage options available to U.S. and international retail investors.
The next inflection point is the Q2 print, expected in late August 2026. Until then, the burden of proof has shifted: the bulls have the data, and the bears need a thesis.
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