Nvidia earnings, due Wednesday afternoon, could deliver a blow to an antsy stock market or reignite a recently shaky AI rally.
Nvidia’s $3 trillion market capitalization gives it more influence over the S&P 500 than any stock but Apple. Still, recent Nvidia earnings reports, despite disappointing some investors, haven’t hurt the index much.
Artificial intelligence stocks have been on shaky ground ahead of Nvidia’s report: Favorites like Palantir, Vistra, and Applovin have all fallen at least 20% in the last week.
Nvidia (NVDA), the poster child of Wall Street’s AI craze, is set to report quarterly earnings amid rising investor uncertainty about the U.S. economy, politics, and the economics of AI.
The earnings report, due after markets close Wednesday, could be a wrecking ball slamming into an antsy stock market. Or it could be the fuel needed to revive a sputtering AI rally: Nvidia has been the prime beneficiary of the AI buildout of the last two years and any deceleration or acceleration in investment should show up in its results.
All of Wall Street will be scrutinizing sales of the chipmaker’s Blackwell platform. Nvidia executives repeatedly have said demand for Blackwell has outstripped supply. Nvidia is expected to report that quarterly sales grew more than 70% to $38 billion and net income jumped more than 60% to $21 billion, according to estimates compiled by Visible Alpha.
This is the company’s first earnings report since Chinese startup DeepSeek shook AI stocks with an open-source model it claimed matched the performance of advanced US models at a fraction of the cost. The ensuing sell-off wiped a record $589 billion off Nvidia’s market value as investors worried that tech companies may slow their spending on Nvidia chips to instead focus on cost efficiency.
However, DeepSeek’s impact—if there is any—is unlikely to appear in Nvidia’s next set of backward-looking numbers, which will cover the three months ended Jan. 26, the day before the DeepSeek sell-off.
With a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion, Nvidia has more influence on the S&P 500 than any stock but Apple (AAPL). Still, Nvidia stock dipped nearly 7% across the three sessions after its November earnings report even as the S&P 500 ticked higher on each of those days.
And last August, Nvidia shares plunged more than 6% the day after the company’s results, but most big tech stocks rose and the S&P 500 finished flat.
High expectations heading into Nvidia’s earnings have led to disappointment on Wall Street. Even if Nvidia beats investors expectations on Wednesday, it may not be enough to make the stock pop.
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