Nvidia continues to make astronomical amounts of money from AI, with the first quarter of 2026 being its biggest to date

Nvidia's latest earnings call said almost nothing about the gaming business you and I know it for—though it's not hard to see that this part of the business is largely overshadowed by the cash AI is continuing to throw around.

Nvidia announced record revenue during the first quarter of 2026, seeing an 85% year-on-year increase overall. Bringing in a total of $81.6 billion, money made from AI infrastructure makes up a huge chunk of that. For instance, the data centre segment of the business itself saw a 92% revenue increase from last year, raking in a total of $75.2 billion.

“The buildout of AI factories—the largest infrastructure expansion in human history—is accelerating at extraordinary speed,” says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

He made similar remarks during a recent call with investors, saying, "Demand for AI infrastructure continues to expand at an unprecedented pace. The buildout of AI factories is accelerating. The value of NVIDIA AI infrastructure is rising."

According to Huang, frontier model companies are eager to snap up Nvidia's AI 'superchip', Vera Rubin in particular.

Per today's press release, Huang goes on to say, "Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value and scaling rapidly across companies and industries. NVIDIA is uniquely positioned at the center of this transformation as the only platform that runs in every cloud, powers every frontier and open source model, and scales everywhere AI is produced—from hyperscale data centers to the edge.”

With all of that in mind, it's not hard to understand Nvidia's continuing popularity—or the fact that its market capitalisation breached $5 trillion last year (it's currently hovering around $5.30 trillion at the time of writing). This past quarter's $81.6 billion in revenue represents only a 20% over the quarter before it, though that's still a sharp uptick—and I'm willing to bet that such astronomical growth cannot continue forever. When that line will flatten is anyone's guess, but I have some theories about what might cause it.