In February this site published a preview of Nvidia's Q4 FY2026 print that made a specific, checkable argument. Two quarters have since been filed and we never went back to it. Here is the grade.
The preview's core worry was not that Nvidia would miss:
"The problem isn't the numbers. The numbers are absurd. The problem is expectations have gotten so high that beating them doesn't move the needle anymore."
That is two claims welded together. One is about the business, and it is settled. The other is about how the stock reacts, and this site cannot settle it — more on that below, because the distinction is the whole point.
The business half, graded
The preview named a consensus of $65.6 billion in revenue and $1.52 in diluted EPS for Q4 FY2026, the quarter ended 2026-01-25.
| Q4 FY2026, ended 2026-01-25 | preview named | actual | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $65.6B | $68.127B | +3.9% |
| Diluted EPS | $1.52 | $1.76 | +15.8% |
Then it named a bar for the quarter after, and put a number on the downside:
"UBS expects Nvidia to guide to $76 billion. If it's $74 billion or below, the stock sells off regardless of Q4 results."
Q1 FY2027, the quarter ended 2026-04-26, came in at $81.615 billion — $5.6 billion clear of the higher of those two figures, and $7.6 billion above the level the preview flagged as the sell-off trigger.
Across those two quarters revenue went from $57.006B (ended 2025-10-26) to $81.615B, a rise of 43%. Net income went from $31.910B to $58.321B, a rise of 83%. Diluted EPS went from $1.30 to $2.39.
So the business answered the question emphatically. A company that beats a consensus by 3.9% and then delivers a quarter 20% larger than the one it just beat on is not a company running out of room.
A note on the Q4 figures, because they are derived
Nvidia's fiscal Q4 has no quarterly XBRL context — it is absorbed into the 10-K, which reports the full year. So the two headline Q4 numbers above are derived rather than reported: revenue of $215.938B for FY2026 less $147.811B for the nine months ended 2025-10-26 gives $68.127B, and diluted EPS of $4.90 less $3.14 gives $1.76.
Both land exactly on what our own stored series carries for that period, which is two independent routes agreeing rather than one route asserting. Net income derives the same way — $120.067B less $77.107B is $42.960B — and squares with $1.76 across roughly 24.4 billion diluted shares.
One number, and why it is not a boast
For the quarter ended 2026-04-26, Nvidia's Rule of 40 score is 144.8 — revenue growth of 85.2% against the quarter ended 2025-04-27, plus a free-cash-flow margin of 59.5%. That is the same top-end failure this site has already documented for a cyclical manufacturer at the top of its cycle: a composite built to separate healthy software businesses from unhealthy ones has nothing useful to say about a company scoring three and a half times the threshold. It is an artifact of the arithmetic, not a ranking.
The margin underneath it is sourced rather than assumed, which took one detour worth recording. Nvidia stopped tagging capital expenditure under the concept most filers use; its recent quarters sit under PaymentsToAcquireProductiveAssets instead. On that concept the arithmetic closes exactly: operating cash flow of $50.344B less capex of $1.757B is $48.587B, which is the free cash flow our series stores for the quarter. The same holds a year earlier — $27.414B less $1.227B is $26.187B.
The half we cannot grade
The preview's thesis was about the stock's reaction, not the print. It opened on thirty-seven Buy ratings, zero Sells and an average price target of $260, called the stock "basically flat in 2026", and argued the trade was too crowded for good news to help.
This site holds no price history — no previous close is stored for any company we track — so we cannot tell you whether the stock moved on any of it. Those February figures are the preview's own, drawn from a February snapshot, and they are quoted here as things that article said rather than as facts we are restating today.
That leaves an honest split. The preview asked whether Nvidia could clear the bar, and it could, by more than anyone it quoted expected. Whether clearing it changed the share price is a question our data cannot answer, and pretending otherwise would be the more comfortable and less useful piece.
We are also not grading the segment lines. The preview named Data Center consensus of $59.9B and Gaming of $4.1B; neither figure is in this repo, so neither gets a verdict here.
What to watch
Nvidia's next print is expected on 2026-08-26, a date our own schedule marks as estimated rather than confirmed.
The number worth carrying into it is not the beat. It is the shape of the two quarters after the one we previewed: 43% revenue growth and 83% net income growth over six months, with capital expenditure of $1.757B against $50.344B of operating cash flow in the latest quarter. A business converting that proportion of its cash generation without heavy reinvestment is the opposite of the capex-bound story this site has been tracking at Meta and Alphabet, where infrastructure spending has been eating the cash half of the score — Meta's fell from 23.49% of revenue to 2.87% in a single step, and Alphabet's went from +9.21% to −4.89%. Nvidia is on the receiving end of that spending, and its own is a rounding error against it.
If that gap between what Nvidia earns and what it has to spend to keep earning it starts to close, the composite above will begin to mean something again. Until then it is a number that tells you only that the metric has run out of range.
Nvidia figures are from our stored Nvidia data and reconciled against SEC XBRL at CIK 0001045810: revenue and diluted EPS for the quarters ended 2025-04-27, 2025-10-26, 2026-01-25 and 2026-04-26. Net income is from XBRL alone — this site does not store it. The Q4 FY2026 figures are derived as the FY2026 annual filing less the nine months ended 2025-10-26, and match the stored series exactly. Free cash flow is operating cash flow less capital expenditure on the house definition set out in our Rule of 40 explainer, with capex taken from PaymentsToAcquireProductiveAssets; the derivation reproduces the stored free-cash-flow figure for both quarters checked. Consensus figures, ratings counts and price targets are quoted from our own February preview and were a February snapshot; this site stores no price history. The next-print date is from our 2026 earnings schedule, where it is marked estimated.