Please see the below article from EPIC Investment Partners, their Daily Update, received this afternoon (21/05/2026):
Nvidia keeps delivering results that make the “this time is different” argument feel less like hype and more like a live market reality check. The company reported fiscal first quarter revenue of $ 81.6 billion, up 85% year-over-year and comfortably ahead of guidance, with next quarter revenue forecast at $91 billion, again well above Wall Street expectations. The message is blunt: there is still no visible slowdown in AI infrastructure spending, and demand for Nvidia’s chips remains aggressively strong as hyperscalers, enterprises, and emerging AI cloud providers keep scaling large language models and agentic AI systems at maximum speed.
The real centre of gravity is the data centre business, which surged 92% year over year to $75.2 billion. Within that, hyperscale customers like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta generated $37.9 billion, up 115% year-over-year, reflecting an ongoing capital expenditure arms race in AI infrastructure. But the more important signal is breadth. The remaining $37.4 billion from enterprise, industrial, and neocloud customers grew 74% year-over-year, showing this is no longer just a Big Tech story. It is spreading into the broader economy, especially among companies that cannot build their own AI chips and are structurally dependent on Nvidia’s stack.
Networking is another key tell. Revenue nearly tripled year over year to roughly $15 billion, showing Nvidia is evolving from a GPU supplier into a full stack AI infrastructure platform spanning compute, networking, and systems integration. That shift matters because it increases control over the entire buildout, not just a single component.
A particularly important data point is Nvidia disclosing that rental pricing for older H100 GPUs rose nearly 20%. This shows that even legacy compute is tightening. When used capacity becomes more expensive, it is not a supply normalisation story, it is a structural shortage story. Demand is not only hitting new chips but also pulling forward demand across the installed base as well.
This directly supports a more aggressive read of the cycle. Rising secondary market pricing challenges the bear case that oversupply will quickly compress returns. Instead, it suggests the opposite dynamic, persistent scarcity across multiple generations of hardware.
Investors will continue to debate how durable this level of growth really is, especially as expectations get more extreme and comparisons get tougher. That debate is valid, because at this scale even small shifts in demand or spending cycles can matter.
But the reality ahead is harder to dismiss. Whatever the eventual endpoint, this has already been one of the most powerful phases of shareholder value creation in stock market history.
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Andrew Lloyd
21/05/2026