Nvidia Posts Record Revenue but Stock Stalls as $150 Billion Taiwan Bet and China Exit Reshape the AI Landscape

Nvidia delivered a blockbuster first quarter—$81.62 billion in revenue, an 85% year-on-year surge—yet the stock has failed to hold its highs. Shares traded at €185.78 on Friday, up barely 1% on the session, and remain 7.6% below the May peak of €201. The market’s shrug underscores a familiar tension: even exceptional numbers can disappoint when expectations have already priced in perfection.

Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.87, topping the consensus estimate of $1.77. The data center division, by far Nvidia’s largest revenue engine, posted a 92% jump to $75.2 billion. Free cash flow has swelled enough for management to authorize an additional $80 billion share buyback and hike the quarterly dividend twenty-five-fold, from $0.01 to $0.25 per share.

Taiwan Becomes the Epicenter—At a Price

CEO Jensen Huang used the eve of the Computex trade show in Taipei to unveil a staggering commitment: annual investments in Taiwan will rise tenfold to $150 billion. The centerpiece is a new Asia-Pacific headquarters dubbed “Constellation,” designed to house several thousand engineers and reach full operation by 2030. Huang called Taiwan the “epicenter” of the global AI revolution, and the numbers back him up—server exports from the island have exploded from $571 million in 2017 to an estimated $60 billion this year. Key partners include TSMC, which controls roughly 72% of advanced chip fabrication, along with Foxconn, Quanta Computer, and Wistron.

Yet the Taiwan bet comes as Nvidia’s presence in China has all but evaporated. Huang acknowledged that the company’s market share for AI chips on the mainland has fallen from 95% to effectively zero, largely because of tightening US export controls. Huawei has been the primary beneficiary. Huang maintains ties with the mainland—he recently accepted a seat on the advisory board of Tsinghua University’s business school, alongside Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Satya Nadella—but analysts view the move as geopolitical chess rather than a commercial lifeline.

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Product Pipeline: Firepower and Friction

Nvidia’s technological edge remains formidable. The company’s new Vera CPU, built with proprietary Olympus cores, has been shown in independent benchmarks to deliver 1.5 times the performance of current 128-core x86 processors from AMD and Intel. For developer tasks such as compiling the Linux kernel, the Vera core is twice as fast per core as traditional rack-scale CPUs. Huang sees this advantage as critical for the next wave of AI factories, and estimates the Vera-addressable market at $200 billion alone.

The current Blackwell architecture, including the B200 and GB200 systems, is reportedly sold out through mid-2026, with a global order backlog estimated at 3.6 million units. Nvidia has already begun ramping production of the Blackwell Ultra variant, which incorporates better HBM3e memory. The next-generation Vera Rubin platform is scheduled to begin production in the third quarter of 2026, with a full ramp in the fourth quarter, using HBM4 memory and TSMC’s 3-nanometer process.

However, signals from the supply chain suggest potential delays for the Rubin-CPX platform, originally slated for the second half of 2026. Orders for specialized memory and substrates have reportedly stalled. While Nvidia officially stands by its Vera Rubin roadmap, the industry whispers have raised eyebrows.

Korea Visit and Memory Talks

Huang’s itinerary next week includes a trip to South Korea—his first since October 2025—for meetings with LG CEO Koo Kwang-mo on “Physical AI,” as well as discussions with Samsung and the SK Group about memory supplies. The timing is strategic: Samsung is preparing samples of its next-generation HBM4E memory (12 layers, 48 GB) for June 2026. Nvidia will need that bandwidth to feed its future GPU generations, and the Korea visit could determine whether the Rubin platform stays on track or faces further hiccups.

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The Long Bet on Robotics and Agentic AI

Beyond the product roadmap, Nvidia is positioning for what CFO Colette Kress calls a “trillion-dollar opportunity” in robotics. Over two million developers already work on Nvidia’s robotics platform, and Huang is expected to deliver a keynote at Computex that may include surprises in physical AI or quantum computing. The shift toward “agentic AI”—systems capable of solving tasks autonomously—is a key catalyst for the Vera CPU demand.

For now, investors are juggling two narratives: a company firing on all cylinders financially, with a $5 trillion market cap and record cash returns, and a company navigating a treacherous geopolitical landscape, betting heavily on one island while losing an entire continent. The next milestones—HBM4E samples in June, the Computex keynote on June 1, and clarity on Rubin’s launch—will determine whether the stock can break out of its recent 7.6% rut. The relative strength index sits at 36.4, neutral territory, but the gap to the 52-week high is a reminder that even in AI’s golden era, the market’s patience has limits.

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