The main feed on a big social app is sorted by software that guesses which posts and ads you will stop to look at. Running those guesses for everyone who scrolls takes buildings full of specialized chips, and the app owner pays for them long before better guesses bring in extra ad money.
The firm that makes those chips sees the same spending from the other side. It books a sale as each delivery leaves, so a larger order reaches its results within a quarter, while the app owner carries the cost for years. That gap in timing is why one piece of news about the spending can read as a cost for one company and a sale for the other.
Comparing the two shares starts with that spending. First find how much the app owner put into data centers and the line in the chipmaker's accounts where that money lands. Then look at profit margins, valuation and how far each share price has swung.
Meta Platforms buys huge numbers of AI chips to run Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and Nvidia designs the graphics processing units (GPUs) that many of those data centers are built on. On BloFin you can hold Meta's price as the METAX token, a tokenized Meta share, on the METAX/USDT Spot market, or open a leveraged long or short on the METAUSDT Perpetual, a contract that follows its share price.
What is the difference between Meta and Nvidia stock?
Meta and Nvidia stock differ in which side of AI spending each company sits on. Meta spends on AI chips to sell more ads, while Nvidia sells the chips. In their quarters to June 30 and July 26, 2026, Meta's revenue rose 28.0%, to $60.8 billion, while Nvidia's rose 105.9%, to $96.2 billion (source: Meta Q2 2026 results) (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results).
Almost all of Meta's money comes from advertising shown to the people who use its apps, and its AI spending is meant to make those ads work better. Nvidia earns most of its money from data centers. Data centers supplied $89.0 billion of its revenue for the three months to July 26, 2026, or 92.5% of the total (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results).
So the two shares carry the same AI build in different ways. A Meta holder owns the cost of the build and hopes for the payoff in ad sales over many years. An Nvidia holder owns the sale. Nvidia counts it as revenue when the hardware ships, which is why its results react to orders much sooner.
Amazon, another big AI spender that sells ads, buys chips just as Meta does. Nvidia is a different kind of peer, because it is one of the companies Meta pays.
How Meta's AI spending turns into Nvidia's revenue
Meta put $31.1 billion into capital spending from April through June 2026, and it guided to between $130 billion and $145 billion for all of 2026 (source: Meta Q2 2026 results). Some of that money pays for Nvidia hardware. Nvidia's Hyperscale revenue, one of the two lines that make up its Data Center revenue, was $48.7 billion in its quarter to July 26 (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026).
Hyperscale more than doubled on a year earlier and made up 50.6% of Nvidia's revenue in that quarter (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Meta's capex for its quarter to June 30 came to about 64% of that line. That ratio only shows scale, since Meta's budget also pays for land, buildings, power and servers from other makers.
The link became a written deal on February 17, 2026, when Nvidia called its pact with Meta a "multiyear, multigenerational strategic partnership". The deal covers "millions of NVIDIA Blackwell and Rubin GPUs", along with Nvidia's processors and its Spectrum-X networking switches (source: Nvidia on the Meta partnership). Neither company gave a price for it.
The same release says the systems will sit in Meta's own data centers and with Nvidia's cloud partners. That second route matters, because Meta also rents Nvidia-based servers through its compute deals with cloud firms such as CoreWeave and Nebius. In that case Meta's money reaches Nvidia through the cloud firm that bought the chips.
Meta still designs some hardware itself and has said it puts money into its own data centers and "custom hardware" (source: Meta Newsroom on the Graviton deal). Most of those purchases are then charged against Meta's profit for years as depreciation, so Meta's AI capex keeps weighing on its earnings long after the cash has gone out.
Nvidia's largest customers and what its filings disclose
Nvidia's filings do not name its biggest buyers, so they never say how much of its revenue comes from Meta. In the quarter to July 26, 2026, one unnamed direct customer accounted for 16% of revenue. Over the first half of the fiscal year, three accounted for 16%, 15% and 13% (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026).
A direct customer purchases straight from Nvidia, for example a distributor, a server builder or a cloud provider. An indirect customer buys Nvidia products through one of those firms, and Nvidia lists cloud providers, AI labs, businesses and governments in that group (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). A large internet company can therefore appear in either group, or in both.
The filing adds an estimate about one indirect buyer. Nvidia says one "AI research and deployment company" contributed "a meaningful amount" of its revenue by buying cloud services from Nvidia's customers, and it names nobody (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Any figure for Meta's share therefore comes from outside estimates, and the company figures give no way to check one.
What the filings do show is how concentrated the money is. Five direct customers made up 22%, 14%, 13%, 11% and 10% of the money owed to Nvidia at July 26, 2026 (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Meta's comparable exposure is to the ad market as a whole, since its revenue comes from selling ads.
Meta's Nvidia network switch deal in October 2026
Meta and Nvidia widened the partnership on October 12, 2026, when Nvidia said Meta is adopting its Spectrum-6 Ethernet switches. These move data between the chips in an AI cluster and handle 102.4 terabits a second in total. Meta's own switch built on Spectrum-6, called N-IceCube, slots into IcePack, Meta's liquid-cooled rack (source: Nvidia on the OCP Global Summit).
The news came at the Open Compute Project summit, a yearly meeting where large data-center operators share hardware designs. Nvidia said Spectrum-6 has twice the switching capacity of its Spectrum-4 switches, and that the switch runs Meta's own open-source network software, FBOSS (source: Nvidia on the OCP Global Summit).
For Nvidia's accounts, switches are part of the same story as GPUs. Its Compute & Networking segment holds the data-center chips and networking platforms together (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). So when Meta picks Nvidia gear for the network inside a data center, as well as for the chips, more of each dollar it spends on a cluster can land in Nvidia's data-center revenue.
The deal also shows how closely the two companies now design hardware together. Meta writes the switch software and Nvidia supplies the chip inside it, and Nvidia described the result as a playbook that other AI operators could copy (source: Nvidia on the OCP Global Summit).
Nvidia and Meta revenue growth and profit margins
Nvidia grew faster and kept more of each sale in its quarter to July 26, 2026. Its operating margin was 66.2%, against 30.9% at Meta, and its net income rose 125.9% while Meta's fell 13.6% (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results) (source: Meta Q2 2026 results). The quarters end on July 26 and June 30.
Quarter reported in July and August 2026 | Meta (April to June 2026) | Nvidia (to July 26, 2026) |
|---|---|---|
Revenue | $60.8 billion | $96.2 billion |
Growth on a year earlier | 28.0% | 105.9% |
Gross margin | 81.4% | 75.0% |
Operating margin | 30.9% | 66.2% |
Operating margin a year earlier | 43.0% | 60.8% |
Net income | $15.8 billion | $59.7 billion |
Free cash flow | $0.8 billion | $21.3 billion |
Net income was $15.8 billion at Meta and $59.7 billion at Nvidia (source: Meta Q2 2026 results) (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results). Gross margin measures what remains of each sales dollar once the cost of making the product is paid, and here Meta comes out ahead. Nvidia has to pay foundries, the outside chip factories run by firms like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), to make its GPUs (source: Nvidia Form 10-K for fiscal 2026). Operating margin also takes away research, sales and running costs, and on that measure the order flips.
Research spending explains much of the flip. Meta's research and development bill for the quarter was $21.7 billion, about 3.1 times Nvidia's $7.1 billion (source: Meta Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026) (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). A research dollar at Meta comes out of a smaller revenue base, so it weighs much more heavily on the margin.
The cash gap is wider still. Free cash flow is the cash operations bring in minus spending on property and equipment, and Nvidia's $21.3 billion was about 27 times Meta's $0.8 billion (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results) (source: Meta Q2 2026 results). Nvidia's spending on property, equipment and intangible assets came to 2.8% of its revenue, while Meta's capital spending came to 51.1% of its own.
Nvidia's fiscal year and the next results dates
Nvidia closes its books on the last Sunday of January each year, which puts the end of fiscal 2027 on January 31, 2027, after 53 weeks (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Meta uses the calendar year. Nvidia's quarter to July 26, 2026 is therefore Q2 of fiscal 2027, while Meta's quarter to June 30 counts as Q2 of 2026.
The offset means the two companies' results never cover exactly the same months. Nvidia's third quarter ends on October 25, 2026, and because the year has an extra week, its fourth quarter runs 14 weeks. A growth figure for that quarter will include one more week of sales than the year before.
Meta set its third-quarter 2026 results for after the US market close on Wednesday, October 21, 2026 (source: Meta third-quarter 2026 results notice). Nvidia sets its third-quarter date in a separate notice, and a year earlier it announced the date on October 29, 2025 and reported on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 (source: Nvidia's 2025 third-quarter call notice).
That order gives Meta's report a second meaning. When Meta updates its capex plan, it is also telling Nvidia's shareholders something about one of the larger buyers before Nvidia's earnings arrive. Both shares can move on the same Meta release for that reason.
Nvidia's price is also on BloFin, both as the NVDAX token, a tokenized Nvidia share, on the NVDAX/USDT Spot market and as the NVDAUSDT Perpetual, which allows up to 20x leverage (source: BloFin NVDAUSDT contract details).
You can watch how Meta's price reacts to its own report and to Nvidia's a few weeks later. The METAX/USDT Spot page carries the token's price as it changes, while the METAUSDT Perpetual page also shows funding and the mark price. While Nasdaq is closed, BloFin may take only orders that cut a position on the perpetual, so a new trade on either report may have to wait for the next session (source: BloFin stock futures notice).
Market capitalization and P/E ratios of Meta and Nvidia
When US markets shut on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, Nvidia was worth $5.2 trillion and Meta $1.8 trillion. That made Nvidia about 3.0 times Meta's size. Meta's trailing P/E, its price divided by the past year's earnings per share, was 26.2 against Nvidia's 27.4, and on forecast earnings Nvidia's ratio was the lower one (source: Stock Analysis Meta statistics) (source: Stock Analysis Nvidia statistics).
Valuation measure, October 20, 2026 | Meta | Nvidia |
|---|---|---|
Market capitalization | $1.8 trillion | $5.2 trillion |
Trailing P/E (past year's earnings) | 26.2 | 27.4 |
Forward P/E (forecast earnings) | 21.8 | 17.9 |
Price to sales | 7.75 | 17.25 |
The two trailing P/E ratios sit almost level, which can surprise a reader who thinks of Nvidia as the expensive one, but one-off items push them in opposite directions. Nvidia's past-year profit includes gains on shares it holds in other companies, $23.7 billion of them in the first half of its fiscal year alone, which makes its trailing P/E look lower (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Meta's includes a $15.9 billion tax charge from the third quarter of 2025, partly offset by an $8.0 billion tax benefit in the first quarter of 2026, which makes its P/E look higher (source: Meta Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2025) (source: Meta Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026). A forward P/E uses analysts' forecasts of the next year's earnings, and Nvidia's is lower because those forecasts assume its profits keep rising.
Price to sales tells the margin story again, on revenue over the past year of $303.0 billion at Nvidia and $228.2 billion at Meta (source: Stock Analysis Nvidia statistics) (source: Stock Analysis Meta statistics). Investors paid about $17.25 for each dollar of Nvidia's yearly sales and about $7.75 for each dollar of Meta's, since each Nvidia sales dollar has recently carried more profit. One-off gains and charges can bend either ratio for a quarter or two, so check what sits inside the earnings before reading much into Meta's P/E ratio.
Nvidia's buybacks, dividends and shrinking share count
Nvidia shrank its share count in the first half of its fiscal year while Meta's grew. Nvidia bought back 203 million shares for $39.8 billion, and its count fell 0.6% to 24,147 million. Meta bought back none from January to June 2026, and its count rose 0.7% to 2,548 million (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026) (source: Meta Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).
Both companies pay a dividend, and Nvidia's grew sharply in 2026. On May 18, 2026 it raised its quarterly payment from $0.01 a share to $0.25 (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Meta pays $0.525 a share each quarter (source: Meta Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026). At the October 20 close those payments came to yields of about 0.46% for Nvidia and 0.30% for Meta.
In the quarter to July 26 alone, Nvidia handed about $26.0 billion back to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. It still had about $99.0 billion of its buyback approval left (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results). Meta had $25.0 billion of approved buybacks unused at June 30, 2026 while it put its cash into data centers (source: Meta Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026).
A falling share count means each remaining share owns a slightly larger slice of the company, and a rising one works the other way. Shares paid to staff add to the total, so a company has to buy back stock just to stand still. Nvidia did more than that in the half year, and Meta did less. Next to buybacks of that size, Meta's dividend and Nvidia's are both small cash returns.
Five-year returns and drawdowns for Meta and Nvidia
Nvidia's shares gained 16.1% in 2026 through October 20 and 18.5% across the past twelve months. Meta's gained 5.2% in 2026 and fell 5.2% over twelve months, and over five years Nvidia rose 879.4% against Meta's 103.7% (source: Yahoo Finance META history) (source: Yahoo Finance NVDA history).
Price change through October 20, 2026 | Meta | Nvidia |
|---|---|---|
2026 so far | +5.2% | +16.1% |
Twelve months (from October 20, 2025) | −5.2% | +18.5% |
Five years (from October 20, 2021) | +103.7% | +879.4% |
Deepest peak-to-low drop in five years | −74.4% | −66.4% |
Days from that low back to the old peak | 411 | 223 |
These are price changes only, using prices adjusted for Nvidia's 10-for-1 stock split in June 2024, and dividends are left out. On those prices, $10,000 invested when markets closed on October 20, 2021 had grown to about $97,937 in Nvidia and about $20,372 in Meta five years on.
Both shares fell hard in 2022, at the same point in a wide sell-off in technology stocks. Meta lost 74.4% between its close on November 15, 2021 and its low on November 3, 2022, and Nvidia lost 66.4% between November 29, 2021 and October 14, 2022. Nvidia then got back to its old peak by May 25, 2023, while Meta took until December 19, 2023.
A five-year window flatters whichever share started near a low, and past returns say nothing about the next five years, a point that matters for anyone weighing whether Meta stock is a good investment.
Volatility of Meta and Nvidia stock
Over the past year Meta's share swung more than Nvidia's, which reverses the longer record. Meta's annualized volatility was 42.1% against 37.3% for Nvidia in the year to October 20, 2026. Over five years Nvidia's was higher, at 51.9% against 45.4% (source: Yahoo Finance META history) (source: Yahoo Finance NVDA history).
Annualized volatility takes the size of daily price changes and scales it up to a yearly figure, so a higher number means a bumpier ride. Over the past year Meta moved 5% or more in a day on 16 sessions and Nvidia on 8. Over five years the count was 70 for Meta and 130 for Nvidia.
Meta's single biggest days were also larger. Its worst day in the past year was October 30, 2025, a fall of 11.3%, and its best was September 21, 2026, a rise of 11.3%. Nvidia's largest one-day move in that year was a rise of 8.7% on August 27, 2026, the session after its results.
Beta gives a different reading. Beta compares a share's past moves with those of the whole stock market, and above 1 means bigger swings. Over five years Nvidia's was 2.22 and Meta's 1.19 at the October 20 close (source: Stock Analysis Nvidia statistics) (source: Stock Analysis Meta statistics). So over five years Nvidia has amplified the market's moves more than Meta has.
The two shares are also less linked than their business ties suggest. Their daily returns had a correlation of 0.28 over the past year and 0.47 over five years, on a scale where 1 means they always move together. They rose or fell on the same day about 64% of the time in the past year. With a link that loose, the peaks in Nvidia's stock volatility and in Meta's often fall on different days.
Nvidia's own risks: China, customer concentration and the chip cycle
Among the risks in Nvidia's 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026 are export rules in China, reliance on a few large buyers, and supply contracts it may be unable to cut. Its outlook for the quarter to October assumes no data-center compute revenue from China (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results).
On China, Nvidia says it is "effectively foreclosed" from competing in the country's data-center market under current rules. US licenses from February 2026 allow small amounts of its H200 chips to go to specific Chinese buyers, but China's government has restricted those sales. Nvidia took a $0.4 billion charge for excess H200 inventory and purchase obligations in the first half of the year (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026).
Customer concentration cuts both ways for a Meta holder. Large buyers like Meta give Nvidia its growth, yet its annual report warns that some customers "can use or develop their own solutions to replace those we are providing" (source: Nvidia Form 10-K for fiscal 2026). Meta is that kind of buyer.
The chip cycle is the third risk. Nvidia more than doubled its supply and capacity commitments in a single quarter, from $119 billion to $279 billion at July 26, 2026. It warns it may be unable to reduce them if demand changes. That demand, it says, depends on customers' ability to "generate revenue and sustain investment" in computing (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026).
Crypto holders have seen this cycle before. Nvidia's annual report says its gaming GPUs were once used to mine digital currencies such as Ethereum. Ethereum's 2022 move away from mining then cut that use, a swing Nvidia found hard to forecast (source: Nvidia Form 10-K for fiscal 2026). Today the demand that matters comes from AI data centers, where large buyers such as Meta set the pace.
Which risks each share carries
Owning Meta or Nvidia means choosing which side of the same spending you carry. Meta's share depends on whether its AI build lifts ad revenue enough to pay for itself. Nvidia's depends on whether buyers such as Meta keep ordering at the current pace. Neither choice is safer in general, since each carries its own risk.
If your main worry is that AI spending slows, Nvidia is the one exposed first, since almost all its sales now come from data centers. A slowdown would also let Meta trim its capex, and the money it stopped spending would lift its free cash flow. If you worry instead that the spending never pays off in ad sales, the sign would be Meta's free cash flow staying thin for years.
A holder who owns both is partly paying themselves. Part of the money Meta spends on chips shows up as Nvidia's revenue, so a portfolio with both shares holds the cost and the sale of the same order.
A leveraged position on the METAUSDT Perpetual adds margin, funding and liquidation risk on top of the share's own swings, and all three grow with the leverage you choose when trading Meta with leverage.
Looking to trade Meta or Nvidia? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and go to the METAX/USDT Spot trading page, the METAUSDT Perpetual trading page, the NVDAX/USDT Spot trading page or the NVDAUSDT Perpetual trading page.
Frequently asked questions
What revenue range did Meta and Nvidia guide for the next quarter?
Nvidia's guide for the quarter ending in late October 2026 is $108.0 billion of revenue, give or take 2%, which works out to a range of $105.8 billion to $110.2 billion (source: Nvidia Q2 fiscal 2027 results). Meta guided to $61 billion to $64 billion for July to September 2026 (source: Meta Q2 2026 results). Both are the companies' own ranges, given in their second-quarter releases.
What do Meta and Nvidia earn outside their main business?
Nvidia's only revenue line outside data centers is Edge Computing. It brought in $7.2 billion for the three months to July 26, 2026, 27% more than a year before, helped by strong sales of Blackwell workstations (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Meta's Reality Labs, which makes its virtual and augmented reality hardware, software and content, brought in $431 million from April to June 2026 and lost $4.6 billion from operations (source: Meta Q2 2026 results). Those side businesses made up 7.5% of Nvidia's revenue and 0.7% of Meta's.
How much of Nvidia's revenue comes from outside the US?
Customers headquartered outside the US brought in 38% of Nvidia's revenue for the three months to July 26, 2026, against 30% a year before (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026). Nvidia sorts revenue by where the direct customer has its headquarters, so a chip shipped abroad for a US cloud firm can still count as US revenue.
When did Nvidia last split its stock?
Nvidia's last stock split was 10-for-1, and its shares began trading on the new basis on June 10, 2024 (source: Yahoo Finance NVDA history). Price histories are adjusted for the split, so older closes look ten times smaller than they did on the day. Meta has never split its stock, and the case for a Meta split turns on its share price.
Does Nvidia pay a bigger dividend than Meta?
Meta pays more per share, $2.10 a year against Nvidia's $1.00, but Nvidia pays more in total because it has about 9.5 times as many shares (source: Stock Analysis Nvidia statistics) (source: Stock Analysis Meta statistics). In the first half of its fiscal year Nvidia paid $6.3 billion of dividends. Meta paid $2.7 billion from January to June 2026 (source: Nvidia Form 10-Q for the quarter to July 26, 2026) (source: Meta Q2 2026 results).
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Meta's second-quarter 2026 results, its 10-Q filing and its third-quarter results notice, Nvidia's second-quarter fiscal 2027 results, its 10-Q and its fiscal 2026 annual report, Nvidia's announcements of the Meta partnership and the Spectrum-6 deal, Nvidia's 2025 third-quarter call notice, BloFin's NVDAUSDT contract details and stock futures notice, Stock Analysis and Yahoo Finance price history, current as of October 21, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Meta or Nvidia in any form. Meta's share fell 74.4% and Nvidia's 66.4% from peaks within the past five years, and a cut in AI spending could hit both at once, from the cost side and the sales side. METAX follows Meta's share price, and a leveraged METAUSDT Perpetual position can lose its whole margin on a single results night. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.