August 26, 2026
WHEN: Today, Wednesday, August 26, 2026
WHERE: CNBC’s “Mad Money”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with Nvidia Founder & CEO Jensen Huang on CNBC’s “Mad Money” (M-F, 6PM-7PM ET) today, Wednesday, August 26. Video will be available on CNBC.com.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
JIM CRAMER: What exactly does Nvidia need to do to impress this market? Tonight we got that answer, because when the world's largest company reported, it was a magnificent top and bottom line beat, both sales and earnings more than doubling year-over-year, and management saying they expect 70 percent revenue growth in 2028 fiscal year. That's the next one. That's incredible. Just incredible. Oh, initially the stock sold off but then it started soaring. Can it keep running? Let's check in with Jensen Huang, he's the founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia, to find out. Mr. Huang, welcome back to “Mad Money.”
JENSEN HUANG: Hi, Jim. Great to see you.
CRAMER: Well, I've got to tell you, Jensen, tonight was a very exciting conference call. And one of the reasons was you did something you guys never do. You gave a forecast about revenue that was frankly blowout. You expect to grow about 70 percent in fiscal 2028. The Street was looking for roughly 45 percent. What gives you that confidence and how the heck could you do it?
HUANG: Well, it's not easy, but let's say, first of all, demand is super strong and, incredibly, it's accelerating. You know, obviously we're already a very large company, but to be able to grow continuously and now to accelerate our growth is pretty extraordinary. Now what's happening underneath, the things that are going on, number one, is that AI is now useful. It's doing productive work. And the tokens that are being generated by these AI labs are now profitable. People are paying good money to use it because it's really productive. It's helping them, you know, do things and be more productive. And, and so the amount of tokens they want to generate is increasing because of use. The amount of tokens they're generating is increasing because the AI models are more complicated. And then now, because it's profitable, they have so many more customers who want to use it. The thing that's holding them back is compute. And so that's literally one pillar of what's happening in our business. And then after that, we're seeing AI being adopted all over the world. Every single country wants to get involved. Every country needs, every company wants to get involved. And so half of our business is in the hyperscalers, and the other half of our business is everything else. It's neo-clouds, it's sovereign clouds, and enterprise companies. And all of this is all growing at the same time. And this is all happening, of course, at a time when we're rolling out Vera Rubin, our next generation product. It's going to be the fastest-ramping product in our history. It's really exciting.
CRAMER: I want to go back to what you said about an asset we call compute. When I was at Goldman Sachs in the '80s, someone said, you know what? We ought to bundle a lot of auto loans, make them into an asset. Everyone laughed, thought it was really stupid. It's now the second-biggest market. I think compute, what you're talking about with the 500 billion, the people who are getting together on Wall Street, compute should be much bigger than auto one day, don't you think?
HUANG: Oh, no question about it. First of all, this is not compute as in your cell phone or your, your PCs that are, that the moment that you buy them, you know, it's, it's becoming obsolete. This is part of your infrastructure and it's productive infrastructure. It's making money for you. One of the things that's really different about Nvidia is that we are fungible, meaning that you can use Nvidia across the entire life cycle of AI, from data processing, pre-training, post-training, all the way to deploying the AI agents. That's number one. Number two, we literally run every single model. We're the only company that I know that runs every single frontier model, every closed model, every open model. It's built on Nvidia. It runs on Nvidia. And because of that, we're fungible. You could use this across all these different use cases. And because we have so many developers, our ecosystem is so large, and we're used all over the world, the asset is durable. It's long life. It's fungible. And therefore, you know, it's rentable. People are renting it for great money these days. And so that's, that's the reason why it's an investable asset.
CRAMER: Did you even know at one point that your, say, 2023 edition might be worth more now than they were when they came out, like some sort of fine wine?
HUANG: It is true. In fact, this, it's some of the CSPs have already been talking about that, that, that the, the infrastructure that they paid for, paying Nvidia's prices, that they built is now worth more than when they first paid for it. And the reason for that, of course, is that Nvidia's architecture is software defined. Because of CUDA, our software is getting better all the time. We ship the hardware in the beginning. We, we sell you the hardware, but we continuously improve the algorithms underneath so that the machinery gets better and better and better over time. So over, over the history, I think CoreWeave, Mike over at CoreWeave, we've recently said that A 100 is going to be sold for nine years of its life. And the thing that's really incredible is during that nine years' time, even though the hardware didn't change, we improved and introduced all kinds of new algorithms and software that we continuously enhance that infrastructure completely for free over, over its entire life. And so that's the reason why the hardware, why the infrastructure just seems to get better and better and better over time. Just like, just like fine wine.
CRAMER: All right. Now that cures one misperception, which is that yours were supposed to be written off in three or four years. Let's take that off the table. The other thing that bothers me, it kind of rankles me, is that I read in the Journal, Nvidia has become a banker to the AI boom, putting in, putting it on dangerous ground. If dangerous ground is investing in, on the ground floor of some incredible companies, well, I want to be dangerous. But is it possible that maybe the, we should distinguish between the investments and the backstops? And help me to try to figure out where this kind of story is just plain wrong, frankly.
HUANG: Yeah. I think they're missing a very big point. First of all, this is the first generation of startups that needed tens of billions of dollars to get funded. When was the last time anybody heard of a startup that needed billions of dollars to get off the ground, and needed tens of billions of dollars to become profitable? That's just never happened. But that's really the nature of AI, the cost of building AI, the cost of deploying AI, just, it's very capital intensive. And there are several companies, these frontier AI labs that are once in a generation companies. And we want to be investors in them. We want to support them. We want to be a partner to them. We would love for them to build their ecosystem on top of us, of course, and then scale up their business along with us. And so the opportunity to invest in them in the beginning was a great opportunity. Frankly, I just wish I invested more. And now that they're scaling up, the tokens they're generating are profitable, their services are profitable, the number of customers is growing incredibly, the only thing holding them back now is compute. But even during this time, they're not investment grade. They just don't, they don't have the track record, the capital track record, the financial track record to be able to capture or secure capital at a low cost. And this is where Nvidia could be helpful. We could be supportive of them to help them grow at a time when everything they make, their tokens generated are so profitable, this is really the time when we can help them with their flywheel. And so as far as I'm concerned, this is one of the best investments ever. It's a once in a generation, once in a technology generation opportunity. And then this lastly. The risk for us, because of the nature of Nvidia's architecture, because it's fungible and it's durable, the risk to us is still, in the worst-case scenario, we'll just use it for another customer in another use case. And so I think the backstop is, is we're thoughtful about it, we're disciplined about it, and we're supporting extraordinary companies as they're becoming profitable. And as we know, you know, there's, hopefully there'll be soon, they'll be, they'll be public companies and people will all get the opportunity to see, you know, what we see and why we're so excited about them. And but anyways, this, this is a really great investment. And I think the risk is, is low.
CRAMER: OK, let me ask you something. It's kind of a personal question. If, if you gave me, let's say you invested $30 billion in me. And then I called you and I said, you know what? The whole time I've been working on, on something, a chip that I think could really hurt you. It's called “Jalapeno.” I don't know, let's call it, I don't know, “Tomatillo.” And, and you said to me, well, that's fine. Would you really say that's fine? Because I personally would be hurt if OpenAI did to, what they do to Nvidia if they did to me.
HUANG: You know, I'm OK with it, Jim.
CRAMER: Yeah?
HUANG: There are so many XPUs that are being announced. And, as we know, it's not easy doing what we do. We've been doing this for 33 years. And so lots of projects get started. Lots of projects get, gets canceled. We're, we're here, we're here to support our partners and, and we're going to build the world's best technology. I have every confidence in that. We're going to be the most productive infrastructure that they have. I have every confidence in that. We have the supply chain and the technology scale to be their largest supplier. I have every confidence in that. And so, you know, I, I don't, I don't have to take anything personally because I've got so much confidence in what we're able to deliver. And look at, look at all of the XPU announcements and all the startups that have been announced. And yet today, Nvidia is increasing our market share of the AI market. We're, our growth is accelerating, our technology leadership is extending. And so I'm very comfortable with all the competition.
CRAMER: OK. And I also thought it was interesting, you know, Andy Jassy loves you, OK? But he's building his own chips and good for him. But when they wanted to expand Amazon Web Services, they, they bought 2 million more Nvidia GPUs. That's quite a commitment from someone who, in some places, is considered to be a competitor.
HUANG: They're going to buy 2 million GPUs. They're going to buy millions of CPUs. And they're going to build their robotics fleet on Nvidia's physical AI systems. They're going to host Nvidia's Nemotron open models on Bedrock and SageMaker. Yeah, so this is going to be a great partnership. You know, I, I think it's just really important that people realize that Nvidia is the only computing platform that is a full stack AI factory. We're the only computing platform that is in every single cloud on-prem, at the edge, in sovereign, sovereign AI clouds, in neo-clouds. We're the only platform that's, in that way that's everywhere. And because of that, we attract all of the world's AI startups. In this last six months, $400 billion of venture capital went into startups because of AI. This is a once in a generation technology platform shift. Everybody wants to be part of it. Four hundred billion dollars of investment into AIs, AI startups, and all of them are probably using Nvidia. And so if any of the clouds would like to attract any of those AI startups, having Nvidia in their cloud is going to make their clouds much more attractive. And so I, and however you think about it, whether we have the best technology, the most productive technology, the most rentable technology, you know, in every single case, Nvidia is a great partner of yours.
CRAMER: Hey, let me ask you something, because I think that you are a leader of all those different companies you mentioned, whether it be the 50 percent that is not hyperscaler or 50 percent that are, you're the leader. Would you offer us a code of conduct for your customers so that they don't do crazy things? They worry about water more. They worry about air more. They worry about electricity more. So that we could say, listen, we're good citizens. You should want us. We, we, because I think you're the only person that has the gravitas to do that.
HUANG: We have to do a better job. The technology industry, the builders, and, have to do a much better job working with the communities to get prepared for this AI infrastructure build-out. Taking a step back, this is America's great opportunity. This is an extraordinary opportunity. AI data centers, AI factories are generating so many jobs all across America, hundreds of thousands of jobs. They're improving communities because they're bringing a lot of tax dollars. They're bringing a lot of economy into communities. It is also the case this is the first time in probably the last century that we're able to invest in sustainable energy, invest in improving our energy grid, securing our energy supply, reducing the cost of energy across the country. This is the first time in history that we're able to do that because of the enormous market dynamics, the market forces that are able to invest in the energy ecosystem. It is the reason why all the energy company stock prices are up and all the power generator stock prices are up. I mean, everybody is doing well because we are helping the United States, helping America enhance its energy position. And so I, I hope that people take a step back and realize that this is creating jobs. It's going to re-industrialize the United States. The manufacturing sector that we've lost over the last 50 years has an opportunity to come back. And then, lastly, a great opportunity for us to invest in America's energy sector, our energy grid, like we've never been able to do before.
CRAMER: Well, it does sound like it's gotten too political, right? I mean, it's too political. We should just be, take the moral high ground. Another big country that's our competitor is not, I think, when it comes to the environment. This is our chance, right? This is our chance to do it. It's also our chance if we do open source, to go against that in a competitive way, that, that, again, that I think environmental destroyer that is China. This is our opportunity for world leadership, isn't it?
HUANG: There's no question this is a great opportunity. Hey, listen, this is a technology that was invented here. This is a technology that has been advanced here. We have to make sure that our communities, our society, all of our companies, all of our people in the United States embrace this technology so that we can take advantage of what this technology could do for all of our ecosystems, all of our economy, and all of our societies. And so this is one extraordinary opportunity. We can't, we can't allow AI to not diffuse across all of the industries.
CRAMER: Right.
HUANG: We must, we must make sure we embrace this technology, adopt it, and take advantage of it.
CRAMER: OK.
HUANG: Otherwise, we're going to get left behind.
CRAMER: I know. Now Apple, a company I know you have tremendous respect for, they felt, like you, that their stock was very undervalued. I mean, yours is selling arguably at 16 times 28 earnings. That seems ridiculous to me. Is it time to make that buyback much bigger than the roughly $98.5 billion left to buy? Why not double that? Why not do what Luca Maestri did? He's such a great CFO. You have such a great CFO, Colette Kress, huddle with her. You know, just huddle with her and come up with a number more befitting of how,of how cheap your stock is. Best investment of all these things you're talking about.
HUANG: We, we are going to, I appreciate that. We are going to return cash to our shareholders. We're going to buy back stock. And buy back stock, all the excess cash, net of what we need for strategy and operations. And we are going to generate a lot more free cash flow next year than this year.
CRAMER: Oh, good.
HUANG: Furthermore, furthermore, this year we have several very large investments. And those large investments in AI labs are not going to repeat. You know, the opportunity for me to invest in these frontier AI labs is not going to happen again.
CRAMER: Right.
HUANG: And the reason for that is because I expect them to go public. And so our, the money we've invested is going to get, is going to generate tremendous returns. But I doubt that I'll have the opportunity to invest more. And so next year, we're going to have tremendous amount of free cash flow. We, this last quarter, bought back 60 percent. And we're going to increase that going forward. So, so I think, I think we're where we feel the same way. Buying back Nvidia stock is a tremendous opportunity.
CRAMER: Cheapest asset out there. Well, look, Jensen I wanted to thank you. Just a remarkable quarter. And thank you for explaining all that stuff about you being the financier. I mean, to me, you've been one unbelievable investor in all the years I've known you. You've got the best record of all, of everyone I've ever talked to. So why shouldn't you do investing? Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. It's great to see you, sir.
HUANG: Great to see you, Jim.
CRAMER: Excellent. OK, that's Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of Nvidia, after a quarter that only takes it to $219, are you kidding? I can't believe where this stock can go. And I'm so glad that I still believe. Own it, do not trade it! Jensen Huang.
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