Nvidia defied the odds yet again to deliver another blockbuster quarter and maintain the weight of U.S. economic growth on its shoulders, with its networking business becoming a “cornerstone” of its data center-focused offerings.

The chip giant reported record revenue of $68.1 billion for its fourth fiscal quarter ended January 25, 2026, up 20% on the previous quarter.

Its networking offerings alone, though, accounted for $11 billion – a 3.5-times increase year over year – which led to CFO Colette Kress labeling the segment a “standout this quarter.”

For the full year, meanwhile, Nvidia’s networking business exceeded $31 billion in revenue, up more than 10-times compared with the year it acquired Mellanox.

“Demand for our scale-up and scale-out technologies reached record levels, both growing double digits sequentially, driven by strong adoption of NVL72 scale-up switches as Grace Blackwell systems accounted for roughly two-thirds of data center revenue in the quarter,” Kress told investors.

Q4 marked a series of networking wins for the company, including debuts of its BlueField Astra unified control plane and CUDA Tile GPU management solution.

The CFO also highlighted wins for its NVLink scale-up (for interconnected resources inside the cabinet) fabric, chiefly a tie-up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to allow NVLink to be integrated with its custom silicon – a boon for the hyperscaler considering its prior chagrin for connecting Nvidia’s NVL72 with its own network cards.

After seeing demand for its Spectrum X Ethernet networking technologies rise to being on par with InfiniBand last quarter, Kress told investors that momentum for its Ethernet-based scale-up and scale-across was “strong” as “customers work to unify distributed data centers into integrated giga-scale AI factories.”

No sweat on Jensen's jacket

It’s been a long road to the top for Nvidia, and there’s been a considerable amount of wobbles along the way. The specter of its nebulous OpenAI investment, for example, loomed large over its earnings call.

But founder and CEO Jensen Huang was at his ever-most bullish in his customers’ ability to continue to grow their capex.

“We have now seen the inflection of agentic AI and the usefulness of agents across the world and enterprises everywhere. You are seeing incredible compute demand because of it,” Huang told investors. “[In] this new world of AI, compute is revenues. Without compute, there is no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there is no way to grow revenues. So in this new world of AI, compute equals revenues.”

Demand for networking technologies was core to Huang’s confidence, telling investors: “We are in every cloud. We are in every center. We are all over the world. Edge and dozens of AI natives are built on top of the AI ecosystem.”

Beyond hardware, the Nvidia CEO’s bravado bordered on bumptious as he touted its software advantage as another driving force behind its record revenues, in apt timing after SemiAnalysis data showed inference optimizations from market rival AMD were “not as competitive as one would expect.”

“Where software starts and architecture starts and ends is kind of hard to tell,” Huang said. “Our software is effective because our architecture is so good. And so the CUDA architecture is unquestionably more effective, more efficient, per-FLOP per-watt.”

Following the earnings call, Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne told SDxCentral that despite “robust” demand for Nvidia’s wares, the market landscape doesn’t look quite as clear.

“The competitive picture is also shifting as companies like Meta diversify toward AMD and the big cloud players invest more in custom silicon,” Bourne said. “This puts a focus on Nvidia’s guidance for what the future holds in terms of maintaining its dominance as the AI buildout matures and questions around enterprise ROI intensify.

“A bright spot in Nvidia's playbook is its continuous diversification strategy," Bourne continued. "Its recent PC market deals signal that the AI giant is looking to build revenue streams beyond its data center cash cow to stay ahead of the curve.”