Nvidia's quarter is easier to describe by what it leaves out. Revenue for the three months to 26 July came in at $96.2 billion, more than double the same quarter a year earlier, and the company guided to $108.0 billion for the current one while assuming no data centre compute revenue from China at all.
Almost all of it is one business. Data centres brought in $89.0 billion of that quarter, up 117% in a year, while edge computing did $7.2 billion. Nvidia keeps 75 cents of every dollar it sells.
Amazon came back for two million more
The order that mattered most landed on the earnings call itself. Amazon Web Services agreed to take another 2 million Nvidia GPUs, five months after committing to more than a million, and Nvidia said demand had exceeded those expectations in between. The chips are Blackwell Ultra, Rubin and Rubin Ultra, and they go into AWS data centres across the following two years. Neither company put a price on it, though TechCrunch reckons unit costs alone make it worth tens of billions of dollars.
Nvidia has been buying ahead of the demand. Its committed spending to secure supply and manufacturing capacity now stands at $279 billion, up from $119 billion a quarter earlier. It has also lined up Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilise more than $500 billion of other people's capital for AI infrastructure, subject to definitive agreements.
The customers designing their way off it
The names at the top of the order book are the same ones trying to need it less. OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are all building their own AI chips to cut their reliance on Nvidia. Amazon told its last earnings call that its custom chip business had crossed a $25 billion annualised revenue run rate, on $225 billion of total commitments from AI labs including Anthropic and OpenAI.
One answer to that, if the reporting holds, is to move up a layer. The Information reported that Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the hub where developers share and download open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion. Business Insider, which first reported the takeover interest, said the same night that the talks had not produced a signed agreement and could still fall apart. Neither company has commented. Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia late last year that valued it at $7 billion, the Financial Times has reported.
Jensen Huang's account of it is that the work has finally become worth paying for. "AI has reached its inflection point. It's doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue," he said. The guidance for this quarter is built on that conviction and on nothing at all from China.
