Numbers that were «extraordinary» — the word came from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang himself as he commented on the chip giant’s quarterly results, released yesterday, Wednesday, May 20, after the close of trading on Wall Street.

So why aren’t NVDA shares celebrating?

The stock was down more than 1%, at $220.66 in US afterhours trading.

Here is what the numbers from the American Big Tech company actually said.

Nvidia earnings beat expectations, and so does revenue: the data center boom, powered by hyperscalers

Nvidia managed to outdo itself once again, closing the first quarter of 2026 with net income of $42.96 billion, or $1.76 per share — more than double the $18.8 billion, or 76 cents per share, posted in the same period last year.

On an adjusted basis, Nvidia’s earnings per share (EPS) of $1.87 beat the $1.76 expected.

Revenue boomed too, jumping 85% year over year to $81.62 billion, up from $44.06 billion in the first quarter of 2025 and above the $78.86 billion analysts had forecast.

Revenue from the data center division doubled year over year to $75.2 billion — 92% of total sales — beating the $73.13 billion expected.

Hyperscalers accounted for more than half of data center revenue, rising 12% quarter over quarter to $38 billion.

All of it driven by the immense demand for the US giant’s AI chips.

And yet NVDA shares reacted with no enthusiasm whatsoever, trending lower instead in Wall Street afterhours trading.

No crash — but the reaction disappointed anyone hoping the earnings release would put the stock into overdrive and dismantle the anxiety over a supposed AI bubble, one destined sooner or later to burst, that continues to hold Wall Street and global equities hostage.

Nvidia’s guidance underwhelms, and CEO Huang cedes the China market to homegrown champion Huawei

The truth is that, despite the CEO’s triumphant statements, the guidance the giant issued for second-fiscal-quarter sales did not impress markets all that much, even though it beat analysts’ expectations.

Nvidia said it expects revenue of $91 billion, above the $87.3 billion penciled in by consensus.

The outlook, however, was not enough for a market that always demands more — with some justification, according to certain observers — from a Big Tech company whose market capitalization tops $5 trillion.

On top of that, the giant admitted it expects no contribution to its results from its China business in the current quarter.

The impression is that the CEO has raised the white flag in the Chinese market.

Huang said Nvidia has «ceded» the Chinese AI chip market to Huawei, because of the export restrictions on China imposed by the United States.

«Demand in China is very high», the CEO said, adding that «Huawei is very strong. It will probably have an extraordinary year, and its local ecosystem of chip companies is doing very well, because we left that market.» In effect, «we ceded that market to them», he said.

These admissions from Nvidia’s number one seem to confirm how Washington’s restrictions on advanced AI chips have accelerated China’s push toward self-sufficiency in semiconductors.

Huang on physical AI and agentic AI: is the next wave already here?

The China factor did not stop Huang from speaking of «an extraordinary quarter», of demand that «has become exponential», adding that «the reason is simple: agentic AI has arrived.»

The CEO summed up his main takeaways from the quarter as follows:

  • The world’s largest AI models are increasingly running on Nvidia. «Nvidia is the only platform that runs every frontier AI model», Huang said, citing Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Meta and Google’s Gemini. The company powers all the hyperscalers, «supporting their core data processing and machine learning workloads, their internal AI services, and Nvidia user demand across public cloud services.» Its broad product range also lets Nvidia move into «new AI data center segments, new AI-native clouds and sovereign clouds, as well as on-premise enterprise and industrial infrastructure.»
  • Physical AI is «the next wave». Nvidia’s CUDA software platform allows the company to expand above all into autonomous vehicles and robotics.
  • The Vera CPU is a «major new growth engine». Huang sees a revenue opportunity of $200 billion if the company manages to win the market, with estimated revenue of around $20 billion in 2026.

«The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI and for physical robotic AI», Huang concluded, noting that Nvidia had prepared «for precisely this moment, so that when agentic AI arrived, it would be ready. And now it has arrived.»

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Laura Naka Antonelli on May 21, 2026 as «Utili e ricavi Nvidia da urlo, ma ansia bolla AI non smentita. E il CEO ha appena alzato bandiera bianca in Cina?». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.