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Other than the risk factors listed below, there have been no material changes from the risk factors previously described under Item 1A of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 25, 2026 and Item 1A of our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended April 26, 2026.
Purchasing or owning NVIDIA securities involves investment risks including, but not limited to, the risks described in Item 1A of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 25, 2026, Item 1A of our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended April 26, 2026, and below. Any one of those risks could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations or reputation, which could cause our stock price to decline. Additional risks, trends and uncertainties not presently known to us or that we currently believe are immaterial may also harm our business, financial condition, results of operations or reputation.
Commitments, guarantees, and other commercial arrangements expose us to financial, counterparty and execution risks and may not provide anticipated benefits.
To support our operations and growth, we commit capital to secure supply and capacity, obtain cloud services, and lease data center capacity. These arrangements require substantial payments over many years. If future demand, our needs or plans differ from our expectations, we may be unable to reduce these commitments. Future demand may be affected by the ability of customers and partners, including those developing open models, to generate revenue and sustain investment in computing infrastructure.
To support our customers’ and partners’ buildout of AI infrastructure, we enter into commercial arrangements, including financial guarantees and other forms of credit support, financing arrangements, and data center leases.
Customers or partners may fail to fulfill their financial commitments, secure necessary capital or infrastructure, complete projects on schedule or within budget, or experience financial distress or insolvency. Power constraints, government actions or regulations, permitting delays, or community opposition may delay, restrict or prevent the development or operation of data centers. We may have limited control over these matters.
Financing arrangements with certain investment-grade customers, including extended payment terms under large, multi-quarter agreements, will continue to affect the timing of our operating cash flows. We intend to assign certain data center leases to third parties. Delays in completing these assignments could cause us to bear the related lease costs longer than anticipated.
We have entered into agreements with AI clouds to enable broader access to our data center infrastructure products. Under the agreements, if AI clouds do not successfully sell committed capacity to third-party customers, we have agreed to purchase that capacity. We may not have sufficient demand for, or the operational ability to use or resell, all the capacity we are committed to purchase. We may earn a share of revenue generated by sales of the supported capacity, but lower-than-expected AI compute demand or pricing may reduce the revenue we receive.
We have entered into guarantees with SB Energy relating to leases at the PORTS Technology Campus that may expose us to substantial obligations over extended periods. SB Energy may not complete or deliver the infrastructure as expected or on schedule, which may delay or reduce anticipated benefits. If OpenAI does not perform its obligations or becomes subject to an insolvency event, and a guarantee is triggered, we may assume the applicable lease, require the landlord to
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seek a replacement tenant, initiate a sale process or choose to pursue other remedies. A replacement tenant or buyer may not be found on acceptable terms or timing, any replacement lease or sale may generate less value than anticipated, and our obligations may continue longer than expected. We may assume long-term lease obligations, incur ongoing lease-related costs or make substantial payments. Although OpenAI has agreed to reimburse and indemnify us for certain losses, we may not recover amounts promptly or in full.
In August 2026, we entered into memoranda of understanding with large capital providers regarding independent financing platforms through which the providers would raise and deploy third-party capital for the buildout of AI infrastructure. These and other preliminary arrangements may not lead to definitive agreements.
Any of these risks may adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations or cash flows.
We are subject to complex laws, rules, regulations, and political and other actions, including restrictions on the export of our products, which may adversely impact our business.
We are subject to laws and regulations domestically and worldwide, affecting our operations in areas including, but not limited to, IP ownership and infringement; taxes; import and export requirements and tariffs; anti-corruption, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; business acquisitions; foreign exchange controls and cash repatriation restrictions; foreign ownership and investment; data privacy requirements; competition and antitrust; investing; advertising; employment; product regulations; cybersecurity; environmental, health, and safety requirements; the responsible use of AI; sustainability; cryptocurrency; and consumer laws. Compliance with such requirements can be onerous and expensive, could impact our competitive position, and may negatively impact our business operations and ability to manufacture and ship our products. There can be no assurance that our employees, contractors, suppliers, customers or agents will not violate applicable laws or the policies, controls, and procedures that we have designed to help ensure compliance with such laws, and violations could result in fines, criminal sanctions against us, our officers, or our employees, prohibitions on the conduct of our business, and damage to our reputation. Changes to the laws, rules and regulations to which we are subject, or changes to their interpretation and enforcement, could lead to materially greater compliance and other costs, and/or further restrictions on our ability to manufacture and supply our products and operate our business. For example, we may face increased compliance costs as a result of changes or increases in antitrust legislation, regulation, administrative rule making, increased focus from regulators on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and risks. Our business is facing increased interest from regulators worldwide, including the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan, and China. For example, the French Competition Authority is questioning whether gaming GPUs and data center GPUs are separate product categories, an inquiry that may impact the export controls applicable to gaming products sold in France and Europe. We have also received, and continue to receive, broad requests for information from competition regulators in the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and South Korea regarding our sales of GPUs and other NVIDIA products, our efforts to allocate supply, foundation models and our investments, partnerships and other agreements with companies developing foundation models, the markets in which we compete and our competition, our strategies, roadmaps, and efforts to develop, market, and sell hardware, software, and system solutions, and our agreements with customers, suppliers, and partners. We expect to receive additional requests for information in the future. Such requests have been and are likely to be expensive and burdensome and could negatively impact our business and our relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners.
Governments and regulators are also considering, and in certain cases, have imposed restrictions on the hardware, software, and systems used to develop frontier foundation models and generative AI. For example, the EU AI Act became effective on August 1, 2024 and will be fully applicable after a multi-year transitional period. The EU AI Act may impact our ability to train, deploy, or release AI models in the EU. Several states are considering enacting or have already enacted regulations concerning AI technologies, with new state laws that took effect on January 1, 2026, which may impact our ability to train, deploy, or release AI models and systems, including those capable of autonomous action, and increase our compliance costs. Restrictions under these and any other regulations, if implemented, could increase the costs and burdens to us and our customers, delay or halt deployment of new systems using our products, and reduce the number of new entrants and customers, negatively impacting our business and financial results. Revisions to laws or regulations or their interpretation and enforcement could also result in increased taxation, trade sanctions, the imposition of or increase to import duties or tariffs, restrictions and controls on imports or exports, or other retaliatory actions, which could have an adverse effect on our business plans or impact the timing of our shipments. Additionally, changes in the public perception of governments in the regions where we operate or plan to operate could negatively impact our business and results of operations.
Government actions, including trade protection and national and economic security policies of U.S. and foreign government bodies, such as tariffs, import or export regulations, including deemed export restrictions and restrictions on the activities of U.S. persons, trade and economic sanctions, decrees, quotas or other trade barriers and restrictions could affect our ability to ship products, provide services to our customers and employees, do business without an export license with entities on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s U.S. Entity List or other USG restricted parties lists (which is expected to change from time to time), and generally fulfill our contractual obligations and have a material adverse effect on our business. If we were ever found to have violated export control laws or sanctions of the U.S. or similar applicable non-U.S. laws, even if the violation occurred without our knowledge, we may be subject to various penalties available
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under the laws, any of which could have a material and adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition.
For example, in response to the war in Ukraine, the United States and other jurisdictions imposed economic sanctions and export control measures which blocked the passage of our products, services and support into Russia, Belarus, and certain regions of Ukraine. In fiscal year 2023, we stopped direct sales to Russia and closed business operations in Russia. Concurrently, the war in Ukraine has impacted sales in EMEA and may continue to do so in the future.
The increasing focus on the risks and strategic importance of AI technologies has resulted in regulatory restrictions that target products and services capable of enabling or facilitating AI and may in the future result in additional restrictions impacting some or all of our product and service offerings.
Concerns regarding third-party use of AI for purposes contrary to local governmental interests, including concerns relating to the misuse of AI applications, models, and solutions, has resulted in and could in the future result in unilateral or multilateral restrictions on products that can be used for training, modifying, tuning, and deploying LLMs and other AI applications. Such restrictions have limited and could in the future limit the ability of downstream customers and users worldwide to acquire, deploy and use systems that include our products, software, and services, and negatively impact our business and financial results.
Such restrictions could include additional unilateral or multilateral export controls on certain products or technology, including but not limited to AI technologies. As geopolitical tensions have increased, semiconductors associated with AI, including GPUs and related products, are increasingly the focus of export control restrictions proposed by stakeholders in the U.S. and its allies. The United States has imposed unilateral worldwide controls restricting GPUs and associated products, and it is likely that additional unilateral or multilateral controls will be adopted. Such controls have been and may again be very broad in scope and application, prohibit us from exporting our products to any or all customers in one or more markets, and could negatively impact our manufacturing, testing and warehousing locations and options, or could impose other conditions that limit our ability to serve demand abroad and could negatively and materially impact our business, revenue and financial results. Export controls and other restrictions targeting GPUs and semiconductors associated with AI, which have been imposed and are likely to be more restrictive, would further limit our ability to export our technology, products, or services, creating a competitive disadvantage for us and negatively impacting our business and financial results. Export controls targeting GPUs and semiconductors associated with AI have subjected and may in the future subject downstream users of our products to restrictions on the use, resale, repair, or transfer of our products, negatively impacting our business and financial results. Controls could negatively impact our cost and/or ability to provide services such as NVIDIA AI cloud services and could impact the cost and/or ability for our CSPs and customers to provide services to their end customers, even outside China.
Export controls have and could in the future disrupt our supply chain and distribution channels, negatively impacting our ability to serve demand, including in markets outside China and for our non-data center products. The possibility of additional export controls has negatively impacted and may in the future negatively impact demand for our products, benefiting competitors that offer alternatives less likely to be restricted by further controls. Repeated changes in the export control rules are likely to impose compliance burdens on our business and our customers, negatively and materially impacting our business. Complex U.S. export rules have already and are likely in the future to result in inquiries and investigations from foreign governments regarding sales of our products, subjecting our business, employees, and customers to increased burdens, disruption and risk.
Increasing use of economic sanctions and export controls has impacted and may in the future impact demand for our products or services, negatively impacting our business and financial results. Reduced demand due to export controls has and could in the future lead to excess inventory or cause us to incur related supply charges. Additional unilateral or multilateral controls are also likely to include deemed export control limitations that negatively impact the ability of our research and development teams to execute our roadmap or other objectives in a timely manner. Additional export restrictions may not only impact our ability to serve overseas markets, but also provoke responses from foreign governments, including China, that negatively impact our supply chain or our ability to provide our products and services to customers in all markets worldwide, which could also substantially reduce our revenue. Regulators in China have inquired about our sales and efforts to supply the China market and our fulfillment of the commitments we entered into at the close of our Mellanox acquisition. On September 15, 2025, China’s antitrust regulators published their preliminary finding that our compliance with applicable U.S. export controls, which required us to offer degraded products to the Chinese market, discriminated unfairly against customers in the China market and therefore violated the terms of China’s approval of our Mellanox acquisition. If regulators conclude that we have failed to fulfill the terms of our Mellanox acquisition or we have violated any applicable law in China, we could be subject to financial penalties, restrictions on our ability to conduct our business, restrictions or other orders regarding our networking business, products, and services, or otherwise impact our operations in China, any of which could have a material and adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition.
We continue to be subject to a series of shifting and expanding export control restrictions, impacting our ability to serve customers outside the United States.
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In August 2022, the USG announced export restrictions and export licensing requirements targeting China’s semiconductor and supercomputing industries. These restrictions impacted exports of certain chips, as well as software, hardware, equipment and technology used to develop, produce and manufacture certain chips to China (including Hong Kong and Macau) and Russia, and specifically impact our A100 and H100 integrated circuits, DGX or any other systems or boards which incorporate A100 or H100 integrated circuits.
In July 2023, the USG also informed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East.
In October 2023, the USG announced new and updated licensing requirements for exports to China and Country Groups D:1, D:4, and D:5 (including but not limited to, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, but excluding Israel) of our products exceeding certain performance thresholds, including, but not limited to, the A100, A800, H100, H800, L4, L40, L40S, RTX 4090, GB200 NVL72, and B200. The licensing requirements also apply to the export of products exceeding certain performance thresholds to a party headquartered in, or with an ultimate parent headquartered in, Country Group D5, including China.
In April 2025, the USG informed us that it requires a license for export to China (including Hong Kong and Macau) and D:5 countries, or to companies headquartered or with an ultimate parent therein, of our H20 integrated circuits and any other circuits achieving the H20’s memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth, or combination thereof. As a result of these requirements, we incurred a $4.5 billion charge in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 associated with H20 for excess inventory and purchase obligations, as the demand for H20 products diminished.
Beginning in August 2025, the USG granted licenses that would have allowed us to ship certain H20 products to certain China-based customers, but such sales were restricted by the PRC government, and we were unable to sell our H20 inventory.
Beginning in February 2026, the USG granted licenses that would allow us to ship small amounts of H200 products to specific China-based customers, but such sales were restricted by the PRC government, and we have been unable to sell all the products for which we have licenses. During the first half of fiscal year 2027, we incurred a $0.4 billion charge associated with H200 for excess inventory and purchase obligations, as the demand for H200 products diminished. After incurring that charge, we have made a fraction of the allowed shipments under the USG’s H200 licensing program. Those shipments account for less than 1% of Data Center revenue in our most recent quarter. The licenses require that the H200s go through an inspection process in the United States prior to any shipment to the customer. As a result, any H200s shipped under the new licensing program are subject to a 25% tariff upon importation into the United States. We have been unable to pass along any of the tariff to our customers, and do not anticipate doing so in the event we are able to sell licensed products into the China market.
The export controls applicable to China are complex and address a variety of parameters, including the total processing performance of a chip, the “performance density” of a chip, the interconnect bandwidth of a chip, and the memory bandwidth of a chip. Under the current rules and geopolitical landscape, we are unable to create and deliver a competitive product for wide distribution in China’s data center market with the approval from both the USG and the Chinese government. As of the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2027, while we were able to ship uncontrolled products to China, such as gaming and workstation GPUs, we were effectively foreclosed from competing in China’s data center computing/compute market, and our effective foreclosure from the China market helped our competitors build larger developer and customer ecosystems to challenge us worldwide. Unless we are able to return with a data center system that meets the approval of both the USG and the Chinese government, our lost opportunity and the benefit to our competitors will have a material and adverse impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition.
In addition to controls targeting D:1, D:4 and D:5 countries, the USG has also imposed worldwide export controls impacting our products, and may impose additional controls in the future.
In January 2025, the USG published the AI Diffusion IFR in the Federal Register. The IFR would have imposed a worldwide licensing requirement on our data center products, such as our H200, GB200 and GB300. The AI Diffusion IFR would have divided the world into three tiers, relegating most countries to “Tier 2” status, and would have created a complex and burdensome scheme for licensing approvals.
In May 2025, the USG announced that it would rescind the AI Diffusion IFR and implement a replacement rule. The scope, timing, and requirements of the forthcoming rule remain uncertain. The replacement rule may impose new restrictions on our products or operations and/or add license requirements that could have a material impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition. For example, in October 2025, the Senate passed the GAIN AI Act in the National Defense Authorization Act. The GAIN AI Act would restrict the Trump Administration’s ability to adapt the Biden Administration’s export control rules and could also allow private U.S. persons to review and overturn licensing and foreign policy decisions made by the Trump Administration. Congress is also considering legislation such as the Remote Access Security Act, or RASA, which could prohibit the provision of cloud services to any company with an ultimate parent headquartered in China. If enacted, RASA could impose new restrictions on cloud service providers and OEMs, and could have a material impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition.
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Our competitive position has been harmed by export controls, and our competitive position and future results will be further harmed, over the long term, if the restrictions remain in place or are expanded in geographic, customer, or product scope, if customers purchase product from competitors, if customers develop their own internal solution, if we are unable to provide contractual warranty or other extended service obligations, if the USG does not grant licenses in a timely manner or denies licenses to significant customers or if we incur significant transition costs. The licensing process may not be resolved before significant business opportunities evaporate. Even if the USG grants any requested licenses, the licenses have already and may in the future be temporary, impose burdensome conditions regarding the installation, maintenance, and use of such products, or include financial or economic requirements that we or our customers or end users cannot or choose not to fulfill. The licensing requirements have already and may in the future benefit certain of our competitors, as the licensing process will make our pre-sale and post-sale technical support efforts more cumbersome and less certain and encourage customers in China, the Middle East, and other regions to pursue alternatives to our products, including semiconductor suppliers based in China, Europe, and Israel.
Given the increasing strategic importance of AI and rising geopolitical tensions, the USG has changed and may again change the export control rules at any time and further subject a wider range of our products to export restrictions and licensing requirements, negatively impacting our business and financial results. In the event of such change, we may be unable to sell our inventory of such products and may be unable to develop replacement products not subject to the licensing requirements.
For example, the USG already imposed license conditions that limit the ability of foreign firms to create and offer as a service large-scale GPU clusters, such as imposing license conditions on the use of products to be exported to certain countries, and may impose additional conditions such as requiring chip tracking and throttling mechanisms that could disable or impair GPUs if certain events, including unauthorized system configuration, use, or location, are detected. Such government mandates in chip designs could introduce system vulnerabilities and expose us to significant risk and potential liability, negatively impact demand for our products, and could have a material impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition. Even if not enacted into binding legislation, draft bills have impacted and may in the future negatively impact our business. For example, following U.S. legislative proposals calling for mandatory features in our chips, China’s government publicly questioned whether our H20 products have built-in vulnerabilities, discouraging customers from purchasing our products. We provided a public response explaining that our GPUs, including H20, do not include such built-in vulnerabilities, and will respond to any follow-up questions we receive.
Open-source foundation models are rapidly growing in popularity with developers worldwide. The demand for open-source foundation models and applications promotes use of our products worldwide. Any regulatory control or other restriction that limits our ability to provide products and services that support third-party applications and models, including applications built on foundation models originating in China such as DeepSeek, Qwen, or Kimi, could have a material impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition.
The USG already imposed export controls restricting certain gaming GPUs, and if the USG expands such controls to restrict additional gaming products, it may disrupt a significant portion of our supply and distribution chain and negatively impact sales of such products to markets outside China, including the U.S. and Europe. For example, the French Competition Authority (FCA) is questioning whether gaming GPUs and data center GPUs are separate product categories, an inquiry that may impact the export controls applicable to gaming products sold in France and Europe. In addition, as the performance of the gaming GPUs increases over time, export controls may have a greater impact on our ability to compete in markets subject to those controls. Export controls may disrupt our supply and distribution chain for a substantial portion of our products, which are warehoused in and distributed from Hong Kong.
Export controls restricting our ability to sell data center GPUs may also negatively impact demand for our networking products used in servers containing our GPUs. The USG may also impose export controls on our networking products, such as high-speed network interconnects, to limit the ability of downstream parties to create large clusters for frontier model training.
Export controls have and are likely in the future to have a disproportionate impact on NVIDIA and may disadvantage us against certain of our competitors that sell chips that are outside the scope of such control. Export controls have already and may in the future encourage customers outside China and other impacted regions to “design-out” certain U.S. semiconductors from their products to reduce the compliance burden and risk, and to ensure that they are able to serve markets worldwide. Export controls have already encouraged and may in the future encourage overseas governments to request that our customers purchase from our competitors rather than NVIDIA or other U.S. firms, harming our business, market position, and financial results.
As a result, export controls have in the past and may in the future negatively impact demand for our products and services not only in China, but also in other markets, such as Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Export controls increase the risk of investing in U.S. advanced semiconductor products, because by the time a new product is ready for market, it may be subject to new unilateral export controls restricting its sale, resulting in excess inventory and purchase obligations as we recently experienced with the H20. At the same time, such controls may increase investment in foreign competitors, which would be less likely to be restricted by U.S. controls.
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The increasingly complex export controls impose complex and burdensome compliance obligations on our partners, suppliers, and customers. We have provided and will continue to provide assistance to authorities regarding attempted diversion, but as we do not have physical control of our products after sale, we must also rely on the compliance programs of our customers and partners. While we seek to strictly comply with all applicable export control regulators, reports of diversion of controlled products, even when unsubstantiated and untrue, or any compliance failure at a customer or partner, may negatively impact our business, relationships with partners and customers, and our reputation. Incorrect allegations that our compliance efforts satisfy the letter but not the “spirit” of the applicable regulations, as well as incorrect allegations that legitimate and appropriate business is using supposed “loopholes” in the export controls may negatively impact our business, relationships with partners and customers, and our reputation.
In addition to export controls, the USG may impose restrictions on the import and sale of products that incorporate technologies developed or manufactured in whole or in part in China. For example, the USG adopted “Connected Vehicle” restrictions on the import and sale of certain automotive products in the United States, which if adopted and interpreted broadly, could impact our ability to develop and supply solutions for our automotive customers. The USG is also considering restrictions that would limit our ability to support third-party applications and models built on open-source foundation models originating in China. Such restrictions, if implemented, would favor our foreign competitors and negatively impact our business.
Additionally, restrictions imposed by the Chinese government on the duration of gaming activities and access to games may adversely affect our Edge Computing revenue, and even if we are able to participate in the China data center compute market, increased oversight of digital platform companies may adversely affect our Data Center revenue. The Chinese government has encouraged customers to purchase from our China-based competitors and discouraged customers from purchasing, importing, or using our data center products, including any China-specific product designed to comply with U.S. export controls. As another example, an agency of the Chinese government announced an Action Plan that endorses new standards regarding the compute performance per watt and per memory bandwidth of accelerators used in new and renovated data centers in China. Although we are already effectively foreclosed from the China market by U.S. export controls, if those controls changed to allow us to return to the market, the Chinese government could modify or implement the Action Plan in a way that effectively prevents us from being able to design products to meet the new standard, which may restrict the ability of customers to use some of our data center products and may have a material and adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition. Further restrictions on our products or the products of our suppliers could negatively impact our business and financial results.
Finally, our business depends on our ability to receive consistent and reliable supply from our overseas partners, especially in Taiwan and South Korea. Any new restrictions that negatively impact our ability to receive supply of components, parts, or services from Taiwan and South Korea, would negatively impact our business and financial results.
Our indebtedness may adversely affect our financial condition and cash flows from operations.
As of July 26, 2026, we had $33.5 billion aggregate principal amount of senior notes outstanding. As each series of senior notes matures, unless redeemed or repurchased, we must either repay or refinance the notes. If we decide to refinance, we may receive less favorable terms or be unable to refinance at all, which may adversely affect our financial condition. We also have a $25.0 billion commercial paper program with no amounts outstanding as of July 26, 2026.
Maintenance of our indebtedness, contractual restrictions, and additional issuances of indebtedness could cause us to dedicate a substantial portion of our cash flows from operations towards debt service obligations and principal repayments; increase our vulnerability to adverse changes in general economic, industry and competitive conditions; limit our flexibility in responding to changes in our business and industry; impair our ability to obtain future financing; and restrict our ability to grant liens on property, enter into certain mergers and dispose of assets.
Our ability to comply with the covenants in our indenture may be affected by events beyond our control. If we breach any of the covenants without a waiver from the note holders, then, subject to applicable cure periods, any such indebtedness may be declared immediately due and payable. In addition, changes to our credit rating may negatively impact the value and liquidity of our securities, restrict our ability to obtain future financing and affect the terms of any such financing.