Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang surprised investors with $500B forec

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang surprised investors with a half a trillion forecast. Itll come up at earnings

NvidiaCEO Jensen Huang revealed in October that his company has $500 billion in orders, in 2025 and 2026 combined, for its chips that are at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom.

For a company that has seen its quarterly revenue grow nearly 600% over the past four years, Huangs statement was a sign that Nvidia is confident of another year of strong but slowing growth for its next cycle of chips, implying that the AI boom still has room to run.

This is how much business is on the books. Half a trillion dollars worth so far, Huang said at the companysGTC conferencein Washington.

Huang included 2025 revenue so far, sales of Nvidias current Blackwell graphics processing units and next years Rubin GPUs and also related parts like networking. After parsing through the details of Huangs remarks, analysts concluded that the statement signaled a meaningfully higher year by revenue in 2026 than Wall Street had previously expected.

NVDAs disclosures suggest clear upside to current consensus estimates, wrote Wolfe Research analyst Chris Caso in a November note. Caso estimated that Huangs data point suggested data center sales that could be $60 billion over prior calendar 2026 estimates. He has the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock.

But Nvidia stock is trading 5% under where it was when Huang called the companys shot on Oct. 28.

Its a reflection of thecontinued debate among investorsabout the AI boom, and whether a handful of big cloud companies called hyperscalers and AI labs are overspending on infrastructure.

When Nvidia reports third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, analysts polled by LSEG are expecting $1.25 in earnings per share on $54.9 billion of sales, which would be a 56% increase on a year-over-year basis. Theyre also looking for guidance in the January quarter of $61.44 billion, which would indicate a reacceleration of growth.

Nvidia doesnt provide more than one quarter of forward-looking guidance at earnings. But anything Huang says about the companys sales backlog and outlook for calendar 2026 will be scrutinized not just for Nvidias outlook but also that of the broader tech industry. Analysts polled by LSEG currently expect $286.7 billion in sales for Nvidia in 2026.

Insatiable AI appetite

At the Washington conference, Huang said the company has visibility into that revenue. Thats not surprising Nvidia counts nearly every multitrillion-dollar tech company as a customer, includingGoogle,Amazon,MicrosoftandMeta.

During October earnings, all of those companiessaidthey were boosting their capital expenditure spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure, which means Nvidia chips.

Hyperscalers rising capex reflects insatiable AI appetite, wrote Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer in a note earlier this month. He has a buy rating on Nvidia stock.

Nvidia has also been an aggressive dealmaker during the quarter, and analysts will want to hear from Huang about the details of these partnerships.

The biggest deal was Nvidiaagreeingto invest up to $10 billion inOpenAIequity in exchange for the AI startup buying between 4 million and 5 million GPUs over a period of years. Nvidia also agreed to invest $5 billion in former rivalIntel. Thatdealwould see the two chipmakers team up to enable Intel chips to work better with Nvidia GPUs.

Nvidia announced in late October it took a $1 billionstakein Nokia to team up to integrate its GPUs into cellular network hardware of the Finnish company. Nvidia also continued investing in variousstartups.

Citi analyst Atif Malik said in a November note that the deal with OpenAI, in particular, will be an investor focus on Wednesday.

Although concerns around the mix of debt and circular financing around AI capex froth exist, we fundamentally see AI supply below demand, Malik wrote. He has the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock.

Nvidia has more than 90% of the market for AI GPUs. But some of its customers including Amazon withits Tranium chips, Google withits TPU chipsand OpenAI with forthcoming chips made in partnership withBroadcom have promoted their custom semiconductors, application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, increasingly over the past three months.

Huang often speaks generally about Nvidias views on earnings calls with analysts and could elaborate about how the company sees rising competition, which investors would welcome, according to Citi.

All of these projections are without any China sales. The companys Chinese-oriented chip, called the H20, was effectively restricted from being exported earlier this year before Huang made a deal with PresidentDonald Trumpin Augustto get export licenses in exchange for the government getting 15% of China sales.

But since then, Nvidia representatives have made gloomy comments about the possibility of significant sales to China, and the company hasnt announced a successor chip to the H20, which is gettingold by AI chip standards. Schafer, the Oppenheimer analyst, said he believes China could represent an over $50 billion annual revenue opportunity.

Whenaskedby CNBC in late October whether he wants to sell current Blackwell-generation chips to China, Huang said: I hope so. But thats a decision for President Trump to make.