Nvidia forecasts 70% revenue growth as AI chip demand outstrips supply

Key points

• Nvidia shares rose nearly 6% in premarket trading on Thursday after the company issued its first-ever one-year revenue forecast.
• CFO Colette Kress said Nvidia expects 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028, covering February 2027 to January 2028.
• CEO Jensen Huang said true demand is "much greater than 70%" but supply shortages are holding the company back.
• Nvidia's ACIE customers (AI Clouds, Industrial, and Enterprise) delivered $40.3 billion in quarterly sales, up 138% year-over-year.
• Some analysts flagged a growing threat from custom AI chips being built by large tech firms and AI labs, including OpenAI.

Nvidia told investors on Wednesday it expects revenue to grow 70% in fiscal year 2028. Shares climbed nearly 6% in premarket trading on Thursday. For a company we've tracked across 14 Jensen Huang stories since 17 July 2026, the number that matters isn't 70: it's what that figure is hiding.

Huang told investors that Nvidia has "never forecasted" a year in advance but now has enough visibility into its supply chain to do so confidently. That's new.

Why can't Nvidia just make more chips?

Demand already runs past what 70% growth would imply. Huang said demand is "much greater than 70%," but production can't keep up. Two bottlenecks are squeezing output: TSMC, the Taiwanese manufacturer that makes most of Nvidia's chips, is stretched to capacity, and memory chips, a core component inside Nvidia's AI systems, are also short. Anyone whose company is waiting to buy AI computing power should expect longer waits and higher prices while supply stays tight.

Is Nvidia's dominance under threat?

No serious rival has displaced it yet. But analysts, as reported by CNBC Tech, flagged a "threat" on Thursday: custom semiconductors being designed in-house by big cloud companies and AI labs, including OpenAI. Those firms have both the money and the motive to reduce dependence on a single supplier.

Nvidia's counter is a broadening customer base. A year ago, Huang noted, one lab alone was driving the buildout. Now he describes "a golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel" alongside industrial clients and physical AI applications such as robotics. Our 27 August story asked whether ordinary businesses could pick up where Amazon and Google leave off. Wednesday's numbers suggest they're starting to. ACIE customers brought in $40.3 billion in the latest quarter, up 138% on the same period a year earlier.

What does this mean for ordinary investors?

Some analysts are bullish. Siddy Jobe, senior portfolio manager at Econopolis Wealth Management, told CNBC's Squawk Box Europe the results "tell you that the valuation today is cheap" and sees "plenty of upside." Paul Meeks, head of technology research at Freedom Capital Markets, told CNBC's Squawk Box Asia he doesn't expect a meaningful slowdown "until 2028 at the earliest."

Nervousness hasn't fully disappeared. Investors remain watchful over big tech spending on AI and whether those investments will pay off, a concern our Wall Street chip-financing story from 19 August put plainly.

Huang's bluntest line was that AI has "reached its inflection point," the moment a technology tips from early adoption into rapid, broad use. That claim carries weight when the revenue figures back it up. Watch whether TSMC capacity expands fast enough to close the gap between what Nvidia can promise and what it can actually ship.