Nvidia had already reported results that sailed past estimates by the time CFO Colette Kress came into the earnings call with a stunning forecast for next year.
Kress told investors that revenue growth in fiscal 2028 will reach 70%, trouncing the 44% average analyst estimate, according to LSEG.
Based on the consensus projection for revenue of $396 billion for fiscal 2027, which ends in January, sales next year would hit $673 billion. That would put Nvidia ahead of Apple and Alphabet, according to Wall Street projections, and behind only Amazon — still primarily a retailer — among U.S. tech companies.
It's the latest remarkable milestone for a company that, before the artificial intelligence boom, was a fairly niche chipmaker. Now it's the most valuable company in the world, and continues to report historic growth rates. Revenue doubled in the latest quarter from a year earlier.
The guidance could have been even higher if not for supply constraints, as the company grapples with shortages in parts like memory, which faces a global crunch due to AI buildouts.
"Our demand is much greater than 70%," CEO Jensen Huang said on the earnings call. "Our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%, and we're going to continue to work with our supply chain to increase on on that."
Nvidia hasn't provided forecasts that far into the future in the past, although during the past few years Huang has provided some data points for expected AI chip sales over two years.
He told analysts on the call that the company provided the forecast because he has visibility into next year's needs for computing power, and Nvidia's chips are driving so much investment that he wanted to be consistent with his partners who provide land and power.
"Everybody's putting a lot of resources in play, and so we wanted to make sure that everybody has the same set of information," Huang said.
Nvidia said on Wednesday that demand for its technology is shifting from massive multibillion-dollar AI buildouts to a widers swath of companies as AI becomes capable of doing useful work.
Investors have fretted that Nvidia's growth has been driven by a handful of large technology companies called hyperscalers, which are building out data centers that end up largely serving a few frontier labs such as OpenAI.
Huang said that some of the early stages of the buildout were driven by "one lab alone," but that the situation has changed and there is now a much broader customer base for the chipmaker.
"Demand is accelerating," Huang said in a statement published alongside second-quarter earnings. "This time last year, one lab alone was driving the buildout; today, we have a golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel, a thriving open-model ecosystem and physical AI coming online — with strong momentum across the U.S. and around the world."
Huang gave some more details on the earnings call, pointing out that he sees much more growth from a new category of customers he calls ACIE, which includes regional AI companies, neoclouds, startups and enterprises.
He said Nvidia's technology is attractive to this group because it can provide so much of the technology in a data center, not just the chips. Such customers were previously largely "invisible," he said.
Earlier this month, Nvidia announced a program to help these types of companies as well as frontier labs access financing from six major financial firms.
"That part of the the world's computing is likely to be larger over time than even what we're currently experiencing in the cloud," Huang said. "The demand that we see is driven by all of those factors."
WATCH: Nvidia results make it hard to argue AI cycle is running out of room
