«Extraordinary» is how Nvidia’s own chief executive, Jensen Huang, described the chipmaker’s numbers as he commented on the quarterly results the AI-chip giant released on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, after the close of trading on Wall Street.

So why aren’t NVDA shares celebrating?

The stock slipped more than 1%, to $220.66, in after-hours trading on the US market.

Here is what the Big Tech company’s books actually said.

Nvidia beats expectations on both earnings and revenue, powered by the data center and 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, of the same period a year earlier.

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

Revenue boomed as well, jumping 85% year over year to $81.62 billion, compared with $44.06 billion in the first quarter of 2025 and above the $78.86 billion analysts expected.

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 company’s AI chips.

And yet NVDA shares reacted with no enthusiasm at all — in fact, they posted a negative trend in after-hours trading on Wall Street.

No collapse, but the reaction disappointed those who had hoped the earnings release would supercharge the stock 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 fails to convince, and CEO Huang hands the China market to homegrown champion Huawei

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

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

But the outlook was not enough for a market that always demands more — and, according to some, rightly so — from a Big Tech company with a market capitalization of more than $5 trillion.

On top of that, the giant admitted it does not expect any contribution to its books 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 that Nvidia has «ceded» the Chinese AI-chip market to Huawei because of the export restrictions the United States has imposed on sales to China.

«Demand in China is very high», the CEO said, and «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 added.

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

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

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

Huang summed up his main takeaways from the quarter as follows:

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

«The world is rebuilding computing for agentic AI and for physical robotic AI», Huang concluded, noting that Nvidia had prepared «precisely for 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 le azioni non placano ansia bolla AI. 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.