Joining Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft, Nvidia just became the fourth U.S. tech company to reach an annual net profit of more than $100 billion. For its fiscal year 2026, which ended January 25, the chipmaker reported $120 billion in net income, trailing only Alphabet’s $132-billion profit in 2025 for the largest-ever profit of any U.S. company.
What’s even more remarkable than the size of the profit, is the pace at which Nvidia got there. Just three years ago, the company’s net income amounted to $4.4 billion – an amount the company took less than 10 days to make in the most recent quarter. Compared to Nvidia, its peers took ages to get from $5 to $100+ billion in annual profit. In fact, both Apple and Microsoft just passed the milestone in their most recent fiscal year, Alphabet first did it in 2024.
The last time Apple’s annual profit was below $5 billion was 2007, i.e. the year of the iPhone launch. It took Apple 18 years with the iPhone – some say the most successful product of all time – to go from $5 billion to $112 billion, an achievement that Nvidia has now matched less than three years after CEO Jensen Huang first announced to the world how much he expects his company to profit from the rise of artificial intelligence in May 2023. Microsoft - in the absence of an iPhone-like product to galvanize its business - took even longer to go from $5 billion to $100 billion - 27 years.
