In a recent Forbes feature, Renana Ashkenazi examines Nvidia’s position ahead of earnings as the company moves from growth stock to critical infrastructure.
Wall Street expects roughly $65.5 billion in quarterly revenue, up 67% year over year. Nvidia has beaten estimates in 20 of the past 22 quarters, and its revenue has more than doubled in under two years. When that performance is treated as routine, “the market is signaling that it has been reclassified, from growth stock to critical infrastructure.”
The more important number sits outside Nvidia. Meta raised capex guidance to $135 billion, Alphabet to $185 billion, and Amazon to $200 billion, bringing combined hyperscaler spending for 2026 to nearly $700 billion. “It isn’t a coincidence, it’s a dependency map.” Nvidia holds an estimated 75–90% share of AI accelerators, becoming the chokepoint through which the largest infrastructure buildout in technology history must pass.
As Nvidia crossed into a “non-optional layer,” competitors shifted from outperforming to reducing dependence. Google ramped up TorchTPU to make its chips compatible with PyTorch without relying on Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem, with Meta collaborating on that effort.
“They’re building it because they don’t want to need Nvidia.”
Nvidia’s China exposure reflects how infrastructure companies become strategic assets. Even after export restrictions were lifted, expected demand did not return. “Sizable purchase orders never materialized.”
“In every gold rush, the infrastructure gets paid first.” Nvidia’s trajectory points to a broader dynamic: “the better you perform, the harder everyone else works to make sure they never depend on you again.”
Read the full article by Renana Ashkenazi here.
