How did data centers take over Nvidia's sales?

What is being counted

Nvidia splits its revenue into what it calls market platforms, and the company draws the lines itself. Data Center is what it sells for data centers. That covers its accelerated computing chips and also its networking products, which the filings group together. This piece sets Data Center against everything else Nvidia sells, taken together : gaming, workstation graphics, cars, and a small group of other sales. From the quarter to April 2026, Nvidia reports those four as one platform, Edge Computing, and no longer gives gaming on its own. When it made that change it recast earlier quarters, and the Data Center figures stayed the same.

All figures are revenue in the dollars of each quarter, not adjusted for inflation. Nvidia's fiscal quarters end near the end of January, April, July and October, sometimes in the first days of the next month. The figures come from Nvidia's quarterly and yearly filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Each quarter was checked against the separate CFO commentary Nvidia files with its earnings release, and the two agree in all 46 quarters from April 2015 to July 2026.

2015 to 2019 : a side business that stalled

In the quarter to April 2015, data centers brought in about $0.1bn and everything else about $1.1bn. Data-center sales grew to $0.8bn a quarter by late 2018, then slipped to $0.6bn in the quarter to April 2019. Nvidia's filing for that quarter explained the drop, against both the quarter before and a year earlier, with "a slowdown in purchases by certain hyperscale and enterprise customers". By the quarter to October 2019, data centers made 24.1% of sales.

2020 : part of the growth was bought

On 27 April 2020, Nvidia completed its purchase of Mellanox for $7.13bn. Mellanox makes the high-speed links that tie servers and storage together, and it counts inside Data Center from the quarter to July 2020. In that quarter the data-center share of Nvidia's sales rose to 45.3%, from 37.0% the quarter before. Nvidia said Mellanox made up "just over 30%" of Data Center revenue that quarter. It also credited the ramp of its new Ampere chips. So part of the 2020 step came from the purchase, not from growth in the business Nvidia already had, and every data-center figure from then on includes Mellanox.

2022 : data centers pull ahead before ChatGPT

Gaming alone fell from $3.6bn in the quarter to May 2022 to $1.6bn in the quarter to October. Gaming is the largest part of everything outside data centers, and that whole line fell from $4.5bn to $2.1bn a quarter over the same stretch. Nvidia's filings gave several reasons for the gaming fall. Its partners bought fewer gaming chips as they cut stock in the face of high inflation and weaker spending. Nvidia also cited the war in Ukraine, which it said hurt sales in Europe, and COVID lockdowns in China. On crypto mining, Nvidia said how much it played a part was "difficult for us to reasonably quantify".

In the quarter to July 2022, data centers overtook everything else combined, $3.8bn against $2.9bn, and they have stayed ahead in every quarter since. Data-center sales barely moved between May and July, and held almost flat through October, so the crossing came almost entirely from the fall in everything else. It came months before ChatGPT was released in late November 2022. In the quarter that included ChatGPT's launch, the one to January 2023, data-center sales even dipped a little from the quarter before.

2023 : the jump

Data-center sales went from $4.3bn in the quarter to April 2023 to $10.3bn in the quarter to July. Nvidia's filing said demand for its HGX data-center systems was "primarily driven by the development of large language models and generative AI". It said the rise was led by cloud service providers and large consumer internet companies. Data centers made 76.4% of sales that quarter. After the quarter to January 2023, the gap in dollars between the two lines widened in every quarter. By the quarter to January 2025, data centers made 90.5% of sales. The share did not rise every quarter : it slipped to 87.9% in the quarter to July 2025 before climbing again.

Now : 92.5% of Nvidia's sales

In the quarter to July 2026, Nvidia sold $96.2bn in total : $89.0bn from data centers and $7.2bn from everything else. Nvidia put the data-center rise down to the ramp of its Blackwell Ultra systems. About half of all sales came from what Nvidia calls Hyperscale customers : "the public clouds and the world's largest consumer internet companies". Nvidia has reported the category only since the quarter to April 2026, and in the quarter to July it moved one company into Hyperscale from its other data-center group and recast the quarter before. So the Hyperscale share is a snapshot of one quarter, not a trend.

What these figures do not show

These figures are sales, not profit. Everything else ended larger than it started, about $1.1bn a quarter in 2015 against $7.2bn in the quarter to July 2026, though it fell in some quarters along the way. Data centers grew much faster. The split is Nvidia's own and has changed over time, with Mellanox inside Data Center from mid-2020 and the four smaller platforms merged in 2026. The figures describe what has happened up to July 2026. They say nothing about what comes next.

• Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter to 28 April 2019 (SEC EDGAR)]
• Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter to 26 July 2020 (SEC EDGAR)]
• Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter to 31 July 2022 (SEC EDGAR)]
• Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter to 30 October 2022 (SEC EDGAR)]
• Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter to 30 July 2023 (SEC EDGAR)]
• Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter to 26 April 2026 (SEC EDGAR)]
• Nvidia, Form 10-Q for the quarter to 26 July 2026 (SEC EDGAR)]
• Nvidia filings, including each quarter's 10-Q, 10-K and CFO commentary (SEC EDGAR)]