A $96.2 billion quarter drew a shrug. Then Nvidia put 70% growth and two million GPUs on the table. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
 
Thursday, August 27, 2026
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What Turned Nvidia’s Earnings Night Around
A $96.2 billion quarter first drew a shrug. Then Nvidia put a 70% growth forecast and two million additional GPUs on the table.
The story
Nvidia closed Wednesday at $209.66, down 1.59%, before the report even came out. After the bell, revenue came in at $96.2 billion against Nvidia’s own $91 billion guide.
Shares fell more than 1% in the first minutes of after-hours trading. The reversal came during the call itself.
CFO Colette Kress told the call that customers’ forecasts pointed to demand roughly doubling next year, but supply constraints limited what Nvidia could confidently promise. The company guided to fiscal 2028 revenue growth of approximately 70%, against the roughly 44% Wall Street had modeled.
Burry, short since August 11, still calls the financing behind it “a Wall Street stunt” with “shades of Enron.” On Wednesday, Nvidia and AWS announced a planned deployment of two million additional GPUs across 2027 and 2028.
Nvidia is now large enough that one earnings reaction like this can move the index fund carrying your retirement, whether you hold the stock directly or not.
In after-hours trading, as of 7:59 p.m. Eastern last night, shares last traded near $219.53, up 4.71% from Wednesday’s regular close. That is a bet on a year that has not started yet.
44%
What Wall Street had modeled for Nvidia’s fiscal 2028 revenue growth.
70%
What Nvidia now says it can deliver, even with supply limiting the pace.
If the 2028 promise holds
January 2028
If the 2028 promise slips
January 2028
Best case
JANUARY 2028.  Nvidia closes fiscal 2028 having grown revenue close to the 70% Kress promised. The planned AWS deployment landed on schedule, two million more GPUs live across both years. Gross margin began recovering after the memory-cost squeeze management expects around the turn of the year.
The $500 billion financing platforms Nvidia lined up with Wall Street moved from term sheets into running data centers. Burry’s short is still open, and it is expensive.
The index fund carrying your retirement closes January having ridden one company’s promise to the letter. The stock that needed a whole call to believe 2026 does not need to be sold twice in 2028.
Worst case
JANUARY 2028.  Fiscal 2028 revenue grows, but not near 70%. Supply catches up faster than demand does. Several large financed buyers slow their own build-outs.
The $500 billion in financing platforms turns out to matter more than Nvidia’s own numbers. The $3.5 billion Nvidia said it was on the hook for was never the real exposure. Gross margin fails to recover after the low point management projected.
Burry’s circular-financing case stops sounding early and starts sounding right on time. The index fund that rode Nvidia up in 2026 gives some of it back in 2028. The call that sold the promise is the same call people quote back at Nvidia now.
How it ends
You get Nvidia carrying the AI buildout into 2028 unless the $108 billion quarter fails to arrive.
Last night proved the demand is real. $96.2 billion against a $91 billion guide is not a rounding error. Data center revenue alone hit $89 billion, up 117% from a year ago. Free cash flow margin fell to 22.2% from 28.8% a year ago, giving the bear case one piece of present-day evidence.
The quarter proved the demand. The call sold its duration.
That is why the stock needed the whole call and not just the reported quarter. A beat this size used to be the whole argument. Now it is the opening one.
The $500 billion in financing platforms and the AWS deployment plan both point the same direction, toward more building, not less. None of that guarantees the 70% actually lands by January 2028. Burry’s bet is that the guarantees and the financed customers matter more over two years than one quarter.
Until that guide breaks, the evidence points to the buildout continuing.
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The hinge
The hinge is Nvidia’s next quarterly report and its $108 billion revenue guide, plus or minus 2%. A result below the bottom of that range would be the first break in the pace management just promised.
Case closed: The $91 billion number
The promise. Yesterday this desk wrote: “You get the boring buildout unless tonight’s forecast breaks the pace this company set for itself in May.”
The ending. Nvidia followed the $91 billion quarter with a $108 billion guide for the next one. That answered yesterday’s question about whether the pace would change.
The pace broke higher.
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