Nvidia Guides to 70% Fiscal 2028 Revenue Growth, Discloses SpaceX Stake and $12.9 Billion Hugging Face Deal

Since Nvidia's fiscal second-quarter earnings report on August 26, when revenue more than doubled to $96.2 billion, the chipmaker has stacked up new deals and new skepticism in roughly equal measure.

Nvidia's data center revenue hit $89 billion for the quarter, up 117% year over year, according to Louis Navellier's analysis for the Epoch Times. Earnings per share came in at $2.22, beating the analyst consensus of $2.09, a 6.2% surprise. CNBC reported, via Breitbart, that Nvidia's AI Clouds, industrial and enterprise segment brought in $40.3 billion, up 138% from a year earlier.

Nvidia told investors it expects 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028, the year running from February 2027 to January 2028, well above the 45% analysts had modeled, per the Epoch Times. CEO Jensen Huang told analysts actual demand from the AI industry is running even higher than that 70% figure and called the sector's current moment an inflection point.

Mizuho analyst Daniel O'Regan called the forecast "shockingly bullish" in a note to clients, according to MarketWatch. He flagged that investors are now trying to figure out how much of that number depends on one customer: SpaceX.

The SpaceX Bet

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told investors on the company's first earnings call last month that SpaceX is going exclusive with Nvidia's chips for its Vera Rubin computing architecture, aiming to deploy 10 gigawatts of computing power by the end of next year. "We think it's the best AI computer," Musk said, according to Yahoo Finance.

Nvidia's relationship with SpaceX runs both directions. TradingView reported that Nvidia disclosed ownership of 122.8 million SpaceX shares, making the chipmaker both a supplier and a shareholder in the same company driving part of its growth forecast.

The orbital piece of that bet is still years out. SpaceX plans to launch its first AI satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027, with broader deployment targeted for 2028, TradingView reported. Analysts don't expect the orbital computing business to generate meaningful revenue until at least fiscal 2029, and heat removal, radiation exposure, satellite congestion and regulatory hurdles could all slow the timeline.

More Deals, More Bottlenecks

Breitbart reported that Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform, for $12.9 billion, following earlier Business Insider reporting that talks were underway. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress told analysts the company's outlook remains supply-constrained. "We will work to close the supply-demand gap, we expect supply to remain a bottleneck, at least through the end of fiscal 2028," Kress said, according to Yahoo Finance and MoneyWise.

Huang said the constraint is real. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing continues to face bottlenecks, and memory chips remain in short supply, according to Breitbart's account of the CNBC report. Huang has said growth would be even faster without the memory shortage.

Huang also announced a $500 billion joint financing effort with Wall Street investment firms to fund the broader AI buildout. DoubleLine Capital's Jeff Gundlach called that arrangement "bananas," questioning how long many AI-related assets will hold their value given the pace of the buildout, Yahoo Finance reported.

The Stock's Mixed Signals

The market reaction has been anything but uniform. Breitbart reported Nvidia shares jumped more than 9% in the trading session immediately following the earnings call, breaking a four-quarter streak in which the stock had fallen the day after beating estimates.

Since then, the stock has moved unevenly. Yahoo Finance put Nvidia's share price at $217 as of Tuesday afternoon, up 5.2% from a month earlier. WalletInvestor's tracking showed shares closer to $223 in a more recent session, down about 2.2% on the day, unable to clear resistance at $230 despite repeated attempts. WalletInvestor noted the stock is still up roughly 12% over 30 days, 16% over 90 days and 113% over the trailing year.

Starting September 17, the crypto exchange Bybit plans to offer round-the-clock options on stock perpetuals tied to Nvidia and SpaceX, wrapping synthetic equity exposure into 24/7 derivatives trading, per WalletInvestor. Trading volumes on those venues remain small relative to the underlying U.S. equity market.

Analysts also flagged a longer-term structural risk that has nothing to do with supply chains: custom chips being developed in-house by hyperscalers and AI labs including OpenAI, which could eventually reduce their reliance on Nvidia's hardware, according to Breitbart's CNBC-sourced reporting.

The 70% guidance may prove optimistic or conservative depending on whether SpaceX's orbital ambitions and the broader AI labs Huang described actually spend at the pace Nvidia is projecting. That won't be testable in the market until Nvidia's next quarterly report and Micron Technology's earnings, scheduled for September 30, which will offer the next read on memory chip supply.