Nvidia’s AI boom just ran into a new $96B question

Nvidia (NVDA) posted one of the best quarters in the chip giant's history.

Revenue reached $96.2 billion in the fiscal second quarter , up 106% from a year earlier and 18% from the previous quarter. Data center revenue alone climbed to $89 billion , a 117% year-over-year increase.

Nvidia maintained a 75% gross margin while producing GAAP earnings of $2.46 per diluted share.

Those figures help to partly explain the jump in Nvidia shares after the news and why investors are again more upbeat about the AI infrastructure cycle having legs.

But another development came nearly immediately after profits.

The Trump administration is mulling a wider set of semiconductor tariffs that could affect not only imported chips but also items based on those processors, including laptops, gaming consoles, and data-center servers, Reuters reported . The concept is still under discussion and could be drastically altered before anything is officially released.

Until now, there has been no revised tariff system.

What investors do have is a semiconductor corporation generating roughly $100 billion in quarterly revenue, a booming data-center sector, and possibly changing trade costs that might impact the gear needed to support that growth.

Nvidia's numbers show why semiconductor costs suddenly matter more

The size is essential for Nvidia since the tariffs on sophisticated processors are no longer a narrow semiconductor industry concern.

In the latest quarter, NVIDIA's Data Center division made up 92.5% of overall company sales. That means the company's fortunes are heavily related to the servers, networking systems, and computer infrastructure being built by cloud providers, AI labs, and huge companies.

The company's growth rates remain extraordinary:

Total quarterly revenue: $96.2 billion, up 106%

Data Center revenue: $89.0 billion, up 117%

Non-GAAP earnings per share: $2.22 Source: Nvidia press release

CEO Jensen Huang said demand is accelerating as more AI labs, startups, and companies build AI systems.

That is the commercial backdrop for any wider semiconductor tariff to try and work.

The White House levied a 25% levy on select advanced computing chips in January, explicitly mentioning Nvidia's H200 and AMD's MI325X. But the declaration made important exceptions, including chips imported for use in U.S. data centers, research and development, startups, and some consumer and industrial uses.