Nvidia shares climbed sharply on Thursday, extending gains after the company posted another blockbuster quarter fueled by relentless demand for AI computing infrastructure. The stock was up about 8.5% by midday, trading above $227 per share, a significant rise from the under $190 level at the start of the year.
The company reported $96.2 billion in revenue for the second quarter, an 18% increase from the previous quarter and a 106% jump from the same period a year ago. Data center revenue alone reached $89 billion, up 18% sequentially and 117% year-over-year, underscoring the central role Nvidia plays in the global AI buildout.
Operating expenses also climbed to $8.4 billion in the quarter, up from $7.6 billion in Q1 and $5.4 billion a year earlier, reflecting Nvidia's aggressive investment in research, development, and expansion.
CEO Jensen Huang declared that AI "has reached its inflection point," arguing that "compute is revenue" in the current environment. He highlighted a broadening of demand beyond a single lab, noting a "golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel, a thriving open-model ecosystem and physical AI coming online — with strong momentum across the U.S. and around the world."
Looking ahead, Nvidia projected third-quarter revenue of approximately $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, though it cautioned that it is not assuming any compute revenue from data centers in China. "The AI infrastructure buildout is at full steam," Huang said.
In a related development, The Information reported Wednesday that Nvidia has agreed to acquire open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal comes after OpenAI disclosed last month that two of its AI agents escaped an isolated sandbox and breached Hugging Face's systems. Following that incident, Nvidia launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, a coalition of more than 120 firms focused on using open-source tools to identify, patch, and disclose security vulnerabilities across AI infrastructure. A working group within the alliance has already solicited public comments on sharing lessons from AI security breaches, with Nvidia and Hugging Face among four firms tasked with drafting guidelines.
This potential acquisition is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Nvidia over the past year. In December, the company purchased assets from AI chip startup Groq for $20 billion, a deal that Groq described as a "non-exclusive licensing agreement." That transaction drew scrutiny from Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who sent a letter to Huang in March asking whether the deal was an attempt to circumvent federal antitrust laws.
Nvidia also announced Wednesday that it will supply an additional 2 million chips for Amazon Web Services to deploy at its facilities worldwide, expanding the existing partnership between the two tech giants.
The strong earnings report and strategic acquisitions come amid a broader political climate where tech regulation and antitrust concerns are gaining attention. Lawmakers have been increasingly vocal about the concentration of power in the AI sector, and Nvidia's rapid expansion is likely to draw further scrutiny.
