Nvidia posts record $216 billion annual revenue as AI chip demand surges

Nvidia reported record fourth-quarter revenue that beat Wall Street expectations, driven by booming demand for its artificial intelligence chips, as the company continues to dominate the global market for AI computing hardware.

The world’s most valuable chipmaker said quarterly revenue rose 73% from a year earlier to $68.1 billion, while full-year revenue climbed 65% to a record $215.9 billion.

Data centre sales, which account for the bulk of Nvidia’s business, jumped 75% year-on-year to a record $62.3 billion.

“Computing demand is growing exponentially, the agentic AI inflexion point has arrived,” Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Enterprise adoption of agents is skyrocketing. Our customers are racing to invest in AI compute, the factories powering the AI industrial revolution and their future growth.”

The chipmaker said it returned $41.1 billion to shareholders during fiscal 2026 through share repurchases and dividends, and said it had $58.5 billion remaining under its buyback authorisation at the end of the quarter. The company also declared a quarterly dividend of $0.01 per share payable on April 1 to shareholders of record as of March 11.

For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Nvidia forecast revenue of $78.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, ahead of analysts’ expectations. However, the company said it was not assuming any data centre compute revenue from China in its outlook.

Gaming revenue rose 47% from a year earlier to $3.7 billion, though it declined 13% sequentially after strong holiday demand. Professional visualisation revenue surged 159% year-on-year to $1.3 billion, while automotive revenue increased 6% to $604 million.

During the earnings call, Huang reassured investors about the long-term trajectory of artificial intelligence spending.

“AI is here, AI is not going to go back. AI is only going to get better from here,” he said.

Interest in AI agents, including tools such as OpenClaw, is driving a fresh wave of demand. “Agentic AI has reached an inflexion point, and it literally happened in the last 2 or 3 months,” Huang said. He added that the next phase will be “physical AI,” as advanced models are increasingly embedded into robots and industrial machinery.