Nvidia stock: what is actually going on

Nvidia is the most valuable company listed in the United States, worth about $5.56 trillion against Apple's roughly $4.79 trillion on the same Nasdaq data, and the single biggest reason the Nasdaq has moved the way it has this year. This page is our running explanation of what the business actually is, what the last reported quarter showed, and what is pushing the stock around now. Every figure below comes from Nvidia's own filings and releases or from exchange data, with the date attached. Updated October 1, 2026: new share price, the $150 billion buyback increase, a patent complaint naming Nvidia, and the jump in Treasury yields.

Where the money comes from

Nvidia sells accelerated computing: chips, networking gear and whole server racks, plus the CUDA software that runs on them. In the quarter ended July 26, 2026, the company reported revenue of $96.22 billion. Of that, $89.0 billion, about 92%, was Data Center, the business of selling AI factory hardware to cloud providers, AI labs and governments. The rest, $7.2 billion, was what Nvidia now calls Edge Computing: gaming and RTX PCs, workstations, robotics and automotive chips.

So this is, to a first approximation, one business. When people argue about Nvidia, they are arguing about how long large organisations keep buying data center compute at this rate.

Customers are concentrated. In the 10-Q for that quarter, Nvidia disclosed that one direct customer alone was 16% of total revenue, and that five direct customers made up 22%, 14%, 13%, 11% and 10% of the accounts receivable balance at quarter end. By customer headquarters, US customers were $60.07 billion of the quarter's revenue, Taiwan $26.99 billion and China including Hong Kong $7.88 billion.

The share price and the size of the company

Nvidia was trading at $230.59 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, October 1, 2026, up 0.97% from Wednesday's close of $228.38, according to Nasdaq data. That puts the market value at roughly $5.56 trillion, up from about $5.36 trillion when we last updated this page on September 19, when the stock closed at $222.27. The 52-week range is $164.27 to $236.54, so the shares sit about 2.5% below their high.

The dividend is small and not the point: $0.25 a share quarterly, $1.00 annualised, a yield of about 0.44%. That payment goes out today, October 1.

The last reported quarter

Nvidia reported its second quarter of fiscal 2027 on August 26, 2026. The headline numbers:

• Revenue: $96.22 billion, up 18% from the prior quarter and up 106% from a year earlier.
• Gross margin: 75.0% on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis, up from 72.4% GAAP a year earlier.
• Operating income: $63.73 billion GAAP. Net income was $59.69 billion GAAP and $53.95 billion non-GAAP.
• Earnings per diluted share: $2.46 GAAP, $2.22 non-GAAP.
• Guidance: third-quarter revenue of $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, with gross margin of 74.0%. Nvidia said that outlook assumes no Data Center compute revenue from China at all.

One detail most summaries skip: GAAP earnings came in above the adjusted figure, which is unusual. The gap is mostly investment gains. The income statement shows $7.77 billion of other income in the quarter, and the cash flow statement shows $23.71 billion of net gains on equity securities over the first half of the fiscal year. Marketable equity holdings rose to $42.78 billion at July 26 from $12.89 billion in January. Part of Nvidia's reported profit, in other words, is the rising value of stakes it holds in other AI companies. The $2.22 non-GAAP figure is the cleaner read on the chip business itself.

Chief executive Jensen Huang framed the quarter this way in the release: "AI has reached its inflection point. It's doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue."

What is driving the stock right now

1. A $235 billion buyback. On September 28, Nvidia said its board had added $150 billion to the repurchase program, taking the remaining authorisation to $235 billion, which it expects to use through fiscal 2028. The company called it the largest increase in a buyback authorisation in history. For scale, $235 billion is about 4.2% of today's $5.56 trillion market value, and it compares with the roughly $26.0 billion Nvidia returned in buybacks and dividends combined last quarter. Nvidia had $99.0 billion left at the end of July; the new total implies about $85 billion remained just before the increase. We worked through the quarterly pace this implies in our buyback story.

2. The Vera Rubin ramp and the size of the guide. Guiding to $108 billion for a single quarter, with no China compute assumed, is the clearest signal Nvidia has given about near-term demand. The company says Vera Rubin racks are running at partners including CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Nebius.

3. Nvidia is now financing the buildout, not just supplying it. On August 17 the company told the SEC it had entered residual value guaranties with SB Energy covering roughly 4.25 gigawatts of IT load at a data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, leased to OpenAI. Nvidia's aggregate payment obligation for that initial commitment is capped at $105 billion, is subject to specified conditions, and OpenAI has agreed to reimburse and indemnify Nvidia for anything it actually pays. Nvidia can also provide credit support for about 3.8 more gigawatts at the site at its discretion. Separately, Nvidia has announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to set up compute financing platforms intended to mobilise more than $500 billion of third-party capital over time, subject to definitive agreements.

4. Buying the open model ecosystem. On September 2, Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for about $11.9 billion, plus up to roughly $1.0 billion in retention equity for staff joining Nvidia. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.

The bear case, stated fairly

The strongest bearish points are in Nvidia's own filings rather than in anyone's commentary.

Nvidia has committed enormous sums against demand that has not happened yet. As of July 26, 2026, total future commitments were $366 billion: $279 billion of supply and capacity, $29 billion of cloud service agreements, $25 billion of data center leases not yet commenced, $25 billion of equity investments and $8 billion of capital expenditure. The supply and capacity line alone jumped from $119 billion three months earlier. If orders slow, that is a very large fixed commitment to unwind.

The balance sheet shows the same stretch. Accounts receivable rose to $63.06 billion at July 26 from $38.47 billion at the January year end, inventories rose to $31.58 billion from $21.40 billion, and long-term debt rose to $32.37 billion from $7.47 billion. Nvidia says it has offered some investment-grade customers payment terms of 90 days up to one year to help with large data center builds. Receivables growing faster than revenue, combined with vendor financing, equity stakes in customers and profits flattered by gains on those stakes, is the pattern sceptics point at when they argue the AI buildout is partly self-funded. A $235 billion buyback commitment sits on top of all of that.

There is also a fresh legal item. On September 29, Netlist filed a complaint asking the US International Trade Commission for exclusion and cease and desist orders against Micron and its customers Nvidia, Broadcom and Google, alleging Micron's HBM3E, HBM4 and HBM4E memory infringes two Netlist patents. A complaint is not a ban, and ITC cases take many months; our story on the filing covers how Netlist's past cases ended. But high bandwidth memory sits on every Nvidia data center package, so it belongs on the watch list.

Add the customer concentration above, the exclusion of China from guidance, and the fact that Nvidia's largest buyers are all building their own accelerators, and the bear case does not require demand to collapse. It only requires growth to stop surprising to the upside while the commitments stay fixed.

What we are watching

• The next results. Nvidia's third quarter of fiscal 2027 ends in late October. Nvidia has not announced a report date; Nasdaq's data vendor Zacks estimates November 18, 2026 based on past timing, with a consensus of $2.47 a share from 13 analysts. Watch whether revenue lands near the $108 billion guide and what gross margin does against the 74.0% target.
• The buyback pace. How much of the $235 billion is used in the October quarter, which the next 10-Q will show.
• China. Guidance assumes zero Data Center compute revenue there. Any change in export policy is upside that is not in the numbers.
• The commitment lines. Whether supply and capacity commitments keep climbing from $279 billion, and whether receivables keep growing faster than revenue.
• Financing structures. Whether the Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR platforms reach definitive agreements, and whether more residual value guaranties follow the SB Energy one.
• Hugging Face and Netlist. Regulatory review of the acquisition through the first half of 2027, and whether the ITC institutes Netlist's HBM case.
• Rates. The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 5.29% on September 30, according to the Treasury's daily yield curve, up from 4.94% when we last updated this page, with the Fed's policy rate at 3.75% to 4%. Higher long rates raise the cost of the debt funding much of the data center buildout and the price of the leases Nvidia is guaranteeing. See our coverage of the September decision, how AI stocks reacted as yields climbed, and live levels on the markets page.

Sources: Nvidia second quarter fiscal 2027 results, August 26, 2026; Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 26, 2026; Forms 8-K filed August 17 and September 3, 2026; Nvidia share repurchase release, September 28, 2026; Netlist release, September 29, 2026; Nasdaq quote, summary and earnings-date data for NVDA and AAPL retrieved October 1, 2026 at 12:30 p.m. ET; U.S. Treasury daily yield curve. The buyback share of market value is our calculation. This page is updated as the numbers change. This is market information, not investment advice.