We delivered another record quarter while navigating what continues to be a dynamic external environment.
Total revenue was $46.7 billion, exceeding our outlook as we grew sequentially across all market platforms. Data center revenue grew 56% year over year. Data center revenue also grew sequentially despite the $4 billion decline in H20 revenue. NVIDIA Corporation's Blackwell platform reached record levels, growing sequentially by 17%. We began production shipments of GB300 in Q2.
Our full stack AI solutions for cloud service providers, Neo Clouds, enterprises, and sovereigns are all contributing to our growth. We are at the beginning of an industrial revolution that will transform every industry. We see $3 to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure spend by the end of the decade. The scale and scope of these build-outs present significant long-term growth opportunities for NVIDIA Corporation. The GB200 NBL system is seeing widespread adoption with deployments at CSPs and consumer Internet companies. Lighthouse model builders, including OpenAI, Meta, and Mastral, are using the GB200 NBL72 at data center scale for both training next-generation models and serving inference models in production. The new Blackwell Ultra platform has also had a strong quarter, generating tens of billions in revenue. The transition to the GB300 has been seamless for major cloud service providers due to its shared architecture, software, and physical footprint. The GB200 enables them to build and deploy GB300 racks with ease. The transition to the new GB300 rack-based architecture has been seamless. Factory builds in late July and early August were successfully converted to support the GV300 ramp. Today, full production is underway. The current run rate is back at full speed, producing approximately 1,000 racks per week. This output is expected to accelerate even further throughout the third quarter as additional capacity comes online. We expect widespread market availability in the second half of the year as CorWeave prepares to bring their GV300 instance to market as they are already seeing 10x more inference performance on reasoning models compared to H100. Compared to the previous Hopper generation, GV300 NDL72 AI factories promise a 10x improvement in token per watt energy efficiency, which translates to revenues as data centers are power limited. The chips of the Rubin platform are in fab. The Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, CX9 Supernic, NBLink 144 scale-up switch, SpectrumX scale-out and scale-across switch, and the silicon photonics processor. Rubin remains on schedule for volume production next year. Rubin will be our third-generation NVLink Rack Scale AI supercomputer with a full-scale supply chain. This keeps us on track with our pace of an annual product cadence and continuous innovation across compute, networking, systems, and software.
In late July, the US government began reviewing licenses for sales of H20 to China customers. While a select number of our China-based customers have received licenses over the past few weeks, we have not shipped any H20 based on those licenses. USG officials have expressed an expectation that the US will receive 15% of the revenue generated from licensed H20 sales, but to date, the USG has not published a regulation codifying such a requirement. We have not included H20 in our Q3 outlook as we continue to work through geopolitical issues. If geopolitical issues reside, we should ship $2 to $5 billion in H20 revenue in Q3.
And if we had more orders, we can bill more. We continue to advocate for the US government to approve Blackwell for China. Our products are designed and sold for beneficial commercial use, and every license sale we make will benefit the US economy, the US leadership, in highly competitive markets. We want to win the hearts of every developer. America's AI technology stack can be the world's standard if we race and compete globally. Notably in the quarter was an increase in Hopper 100 and H200 shipments. We also sold approximately $650 million of H20 in Q2 to an unrestricted customer outside of China. The sequential increase in Hopper demand indicates the breadth of data center workloads that run on accelerated computing and the power of CUDA libraries and full stack optimizations, which continuously enhance the performance and economic value of our platform. As we continue to deliver both Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, we are focusing on meeting the soaring global demand. This growth is fueled by capital expenditures from the cloud to enterprises, which are on track to invest $600 billion in data center infrastructure and compute this calendar year alone, nearly doubling in two years.
We expect annual AI infrastructure investments to continue growing, driven by several factors: reasoning agentic AI requiring orders of magnitude more training and inference compute, global build-outs for Sovereign AI, enterprise AI adoption, and the arrival of physical AI and robotics. Blackwell has set the benchmark as it is the new standard for AI inference performance. The market for AI inference is expanding rapidly with reasoning and agentic AI gaining traction across industries.
Blackwell's RackScale NVLink and CUDA full stack architecture addresses this by redefining the economics of inference. New NVFP44 bit precision and NVLink 72 on the GB300 platform delivers a 50x increase in energy efficiency per token compared to Hopper, enabling companies to monetize their compute at unprecedented scale. For instance, a $3 million investment in GV200 can generate $30 million in token revenue, a 10x return. NVIDIA Corporation's software innovation combined with the strength of our developer ecosystem has already improved Blackwell's performance by more than 2x since its launch. Advances in CUDA, TensorRT LLM, and Dynamo are unlocking maximum efficiency. CUDA library contributions from the open-source community along with NVIDIA Corporation's open libraries and frameworks are now integrated into millions of workflows. This powerful flywheel of collaborative innovation between NVIDIA Corporation and global community contribution strengthens NVIDIA Corporation's performance leadership. NVIDIA Corporation is a top contributor to OpenAI models, data, and software.
Blackwell has introduced a groundbreaking numerical approach to large language model pre-training. Using NBFP4 computations on the GB300 can now achieve 7x faster training than the H100, which uses FP8. This innovation delivers the accuracy of 16-bit precision with the speed and efficiency of 4-bit, setting a new standard for AI factor efficiency and scalability. The AI industry is quickly adopting this revolutionary technology, with major players such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI, as well as Cohere, Mistral, Kimi AI, Perplexity, Reflection, and Runway, already embracing it. NVIDIA Corporation's performance leadership was further validated in the latest MLPerth training benchmarks, where the GB200 delivered a clean sweep. Be on the lookout for the upcoming MLPerf inference results in September, which will include benchmarks based on the Blackwell Ultra. NVIDIA RTX Pro servers are in full production for the world system makers. These are air-cooled PCIe-based systems integrated seamlessly into standard IT environments and run traditional enterprise 90 companies, including many global leaders, are already adopting RTX Pro servers. Hitachi uses them for real-time simulation and digital twins, Lily for drug discovery, Hyundai for factory design and AV validation, and Disney for immersive storytelling. As enterprises modernize data centers, RTX Pro servers are poised to become a multibillion-dollar product line.
Sovereign AI is on the rise as the nation's ability to develop its own AI using domestic infrastructure, data, and talent presents a significant opportunity for NVIDIA Corporation. NVIDIA Corporation is at the forefront of landmark initiatives across the UK and Europe. The European Union plans to invest €20 billion to establish 20 AI factories across France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, including five gigafactories to increase its AI compute infrastructure tenfold. In the UK, the Isambard AI supercomputer powered by NVIDIA Corporation was unveiled as the country's most powerful AI system, delivering 21 exaflops of AI performance to accelerate breakthroughs in fields of drug discovery and climate modeling. We are on track to achieve over $20 billion in Sovereign AI revenue this year, more than double that of last year. Networking delivered record revenue of $7.3 billion, and escalating demands of AI compute clusters necessitate high if and low latency networking.
This represents a 46% sequential and 98% year-on-year increase with strong demand across Spectrum X Ethernet, InfiniBand, and NVLink. Our Spectrum X enhanced Ethernet solutions provide the highest throughput and lowest latency network for Ethernet AI workloads. Spectrum X Ethernet delivered double-digit sequential and year-over-year growth with annualized revenue exceeding $10 billion. At hot chips, we introduced SPECTRUM, XGS, Ethernet, a technology designed to unify disparate data centers into gigascale AI super factories.
Farweave is an initial adopter of the solution, which is projected to double GPU to GPU communication speed. InfiniBand revenue nearly doubled sequentially, fueled by the adoption of XDR technology, which provides double the bandwidth improvement over its predecessor, especially valuable for the model builders. The world's fastest switch NVLink, with 14x the bandwidth of PCIe Gen five, delivered strong growth as customers deployed Brace Blackwell and D Link Rack Scale systems. The positive reception to NVLink fusion, which allows semicustom AI infrastructure, has been widespread. Japan's upcoming Fugaku NEXT will integrate Fujitsu's CPUs with our architecture via NVLink Fusion. It will run a range of workloads, including AI, supercomputing, and quantum computing. Fugaku NEXT joins a rapidly expanding list of leading quantum supercomputing and research centers running on NVIDIA Corporation's CUDA Q quantum platform, including ULEC, AIST, NNF, and NERSC. Supported by over 300 ecosystem partners, including AWS, Google Quantum, AI, Quantinuum, QEra, and SciQuantum. Justin Thor, our new robotics computing platform, is now available. Thor delivers an order of magnitude greater AI performance and energy efficiency than NVIDIA AGX Orin. It runs the latest generative and reasoning AI models at the edge in real-time, enabling state-of-the-art robotics. Adoption of NVIDIA Corporation's robotics full stack platform is growing at a rapid rate. Over 2 million developers and 1,000 plus hardware, software applications, and sensor partners are taking our platform to market. Leading enterprises across industries have adopted Thor, including Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar, Figure, Hexagon, Medtronic, and Meta. Robotic applications require exponentially more compute on the device and in infrastructure, representing a significant long-term demand driver for our data center platform. NVIDIA Omniverse with Cosmos is our data center physical AI digital platform built for the development of robot and robotic systems. This quarter, we announced a major expansion of our partnership with Siemens to enable AI automatic factories. Leading European robotics companies, including Agile Robots, neurorobotics, and universal robots, are building their latest innovations with the Omniverse platform. Transitioning to a quick summary of our revenue by geography.
China declined on a sequential basis to low single digits percentage of data center revenue. Note, our Q3 outlook does not include H20 shipments to China customers. Singapore revenue represented 22% of second quarter's billed revenue as customers have centralized their invoicing in Singapore. Over 99% of data center compute revenue billed to Singapore was for US-based customers. Our gaming revenue was a record $4.3 billion, a 14% sequential increase and a 49% jump year on year.
This was driven by the ramp of Blackwell GeForce GPUs as strong sales continued as we increase supply availability. This quarter, we shipped GeForce RTX 5060 desktop GPU. It brings double the performance along with advanced ray tracing, neural rendering, and AI-powered DLSS four. Gameplay to millions of gamers worldwide. Blackwell is coming to GeForce NOW in September. This is GeForce NOW's most significant upgrade, offering RTX 5080 class performance, minimal latency, and 5K resolution at 120 frames per second. We are also doubling the GeForce NOW catalog to over 4,500 titles, the largest library of any cloud gaming service. For AI enthusiasts, on-device AI performs the best RTX GPUs. We partnered with OpenAI to optimize their open-source GPT models for high-quality, fast, and efficient inference on millions of RTX-enabled window devices. With the RTX platform stack, window developers can create AI applications designed to run on the world's largest AI PC user base.
Professional visualization revenue reached $601 million, a 32% year-on-year increase. Growth was driven by an adoption of the high-end RTX workstation GPUs and AI-powered workloads like design, simulation, and prototyping. Key customers are leveraging our solutions to accelerate their operations. Activision Blizzard uses RTX workstations to enhance creative workflows, while robotics innovator Figure AI powers its humanoid robots with RTX embedded GPUs. Automotive revenue, which includes only in-car compute revenue, was $586 million, up 69% year on year, primarily driven by self-driving solutions.
We have begun shipments of NVIDIA Thor SoC, the successor to Orin. Thor's arrival coincides with the industry's accelerating shift to vision, language, model architecture, generative AI, and higher levels of autonomy. Thor is the most successful robotics and AV computer we have ever created or will power. Our full stack drive AV software platform is now opening up billions to new revenue opportunities for NVIDIA Corporation while improving vehicle safety and autonomy.
Now moving to the rest of our P&L. GAAP gross margin was 72.4%, and non-GAAP gross margin was 72.7%. These figures include a $180 million or 40 basis point benefit from releasing previously reserved H20 inventory. Excluding this benefit, non-GAAP gross margins would have been 72.3%, still exceeding our outlook. GAAP operating expenses rose 86% on a non-GAAP basis sequentially. This increase was driven by higher compute and infrastructure costs as well as higher compensation and benefit costs.
To support the ramp of Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra, inventory increased sequentially from $11 billion to $15 billion in Q2. While we prioritize funding, our growth and strategic initiatives in Q2, we returned $10 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and cash dividends. Our board of directors recently approved a $60 billion share repurchase authorization to add to our remaining $14.7 billion of authorization at the end of Q2. Okay. Let me turn it to the outlook for the third quarter. Total revenue is expected to be $54 billion plus or minus 2%. This represents over $7 billion in sequential growth. Again, we do not assume any H20 shipments to China customers in our outlook. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 73.3% and 73.5%, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points. We continue to expect to exit the year with non-GAAP gross margins in the mid-seventies. GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $5.9 billion and $4.2 billion, respectively. For the full year, we expect operating expenses to grow in the high thirties range year over year, up from our prior expectations of the mid-thirties. We are accelerating investments in the business to address the magnitude of growth opportunities that lie ahead. GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expenses are expected to be an income of approximately $500 million, excluding gains and losses from non-marketable and publicly held equity securities. GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are expected to be 16.5%, plus or minus 1%, excluding any discrete items. Further financial data are included in the CFO commentary and other information available on our website.
In closing, let me highlight upcoming events for the financial community. We will be at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference on September 8 in San Francisco. Our annual NDR will commence the October GTC data center begins on October 27 with Jensen's keynote scheduled for the twenty-eighth. We look forward to seeing you at these events. Our earnings call to discuss the results of our 2026 is scheduled for November 19. We will now open the call for questions. Operator, would you please poll for questions?