President Trump has spent the spring of 2026 telling anyone with a microphone that the stock market belongs to him. The S&P 500 is up, the tape is green, the victory lap is well underway. The problem with that story is arithmetic. Strip out one stock, and the bull market looks like one Santa Clara company selling a lot of GPUs, with the presidential triumph mostly along for the ride.
That stock is NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction), now worth $5.2 trillion and carrying the index on its back. Trump can claim the rally. The receipts belong to Jensen Huang.
Trump’s victory lap has a math problem
The S&P 500 is up 10.3% year to date through May 27, which sounds healthy until you look underneath. Only 57% of S&P 500 stocks are green this year and 61% of components are underperforming the index. CNBC’s Dominic Chu pinned the index’s eighth straight winning week squarely on NVIDIA.
When you hear “record highs,” what you are mostly hearing is one company adding trillions in market cap and dragging cap-weighted benchmarks along for the ride. The median stock is having a fine year. The average index, thanks to NVIDIA’s 14% YTD gain and its enormous weight, looks spectacular.
The NVDA numbers that built this rally
NVIDIA’s Q1 fiscal 2027 report, filed May 20, 2026, is the kind of document that bends an entire market. Revenue came in at $82 billion, up 85% year over year, with a $13.5 billion sequential increase that was a new company record. Data center revenue alone was $75 billion, up 92% YoY. Networking inside that segment grew 199%, which tells you the buildout now spans full racks, fabrics, and switches alongside the chips.
Margins held at a 75.0% non-GAAP gross margin. Free cash flow was $48.55 billion in a single quarter. The board approved an additional $80.0 billion share repurchase authorization and raised the dividend from $0.01 to $0.25 per share. The details, including $119.0 billion in total supply-related commitments, sit in the 8-K filed with the SEC.
Four straight beats. Revenue growth accelerating from 55.6% in Q2 FY2026 to 85.2% in Q1 FY2027. Data center now 92% of total revenue. This is what an earnings-driven rally looks like, and it has very little to do with who occupies the Oval Office.
What Jensen Huang said that Trump didn’t
Huang’s pitch is bigger than the quarter. At GTC, he said he expects $1 trillion from Blackwell and Vera Rubin processors across 2026 and 2027 alone. On the earnings call, CFO Colette Kress told investors NVIDIA has “visibility to a half a trillion dollars in Blackwell and Rubin revenue” through the end of calendar 2026.
Huang framed it more grandly, calling the “buildout of AI factories the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.” Hyperbolic, sure, but the customer roster supports it. OpenAI committed to at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems, Anthropic is scaling on Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin, and Meta signed a multiyear deal for millions of Blackwell and Rubin GPUs.
Next-quarter guidance came in at $91 billion, implying roughly 95% growth, and that figure assumes no Data Center compute revenue from China. NVIDIA is guiding to a doubling of revenue while writing off the world’s second-largest economy.
Analysts have an average price target of $295.69 with 48 Buy and 10 Strong Buy ratings. The forward earnings multiple sits around 24x, which for a company growing earnings at this clip is not obviously expensive.
If Blackwell demand wobbles, or if Kress’s half-trillion visibility number proves optimistic, the rally Trump is taking credit for will reveal exactly who was holding the pen.
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