Nvidia earnings live updates: Options market signals sharp stock swing

Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results after the bell. Here's what analysts are expecting, according to LSEG.

Analysts are looking for year-over-year revenue growth of 79%, reflecting an ongoing spending splurge by the world's top internet companies and AI model developers. The robust expansion is expected to continue, with analysts projecting sales growth of 86% in the fiscal second quarter to $86.8 billion, according to LSEG.

Despite its historic run, Nvidia is no longer the darling of Wall Street among chipmakers as investors have gravitated toward Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and memory company Micron, which have been some of the market's top performers this year.

Still, Nvidia's past month has been solid, with the stock gaining 11% over that stretch, "recognition that its position as the critical provider of compute equipment is not changing any time soon," analysts at D.A. Davidson wrote in a report this week. They recommend buying the shares.

With competition emerging from the likes of Amazon and Google as well as from smaller chip rival AMD, investors are eager to hear updates on Vera Rubin, Nvidia's newest and most-advanced rack-scale system.

CNBC's reporters are covering Nvidia earnings from bureaus in San Francisco and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Nvidia shares have tumbled after the chip giant's three most recent financial results. Despite huge demand for its AI chips, analyst expectations may have hit unattainable highs.

Nvidia beat expectations in 18 of the last 20 quarters, yet its stock fell 5% after reporting fiscal fourth quarter results in February. It was down 3% and 0.8% following the previous two reports.

The last time Nvidia saw a double-digit stock move in reaction to earnings was more than two years ago, in early 2024.

Nvidia's last miss on earnings per share and revenue came in 2022.

Investors are positioning ahead of Nvidia's earnings drop, and there are some unusual moves in the options market.

Options are implying a 5% to 7% move, with a lot of the action leaning bullish.

Memory prices are up across the board as the global shortage continues, and analysts are watching to see if this could prove a material headwind for Nvidia.

Insatiable demand for AI has largely exhausted supply of what's known as high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, from leading memory makers Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.

HBM is made by stacking large amounts of Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM, that enables fast, temporary data storage so chips can run parallel tasks. This is especially crucial for the high-power graphics processing units that make up the majority of Nvidia's business.

So far, consumer electronics have borne the brunt of the DRAM shortage, as chipmakers like Nvidia reserve their limited supply for AI chips instead of those used in less powerful devices. Gartner predicts PC prices will rise by 17% this year.

According to data from Counterpoint Research, the DRAM market has recorded 30% quarter-over-quarter growth for two consecutive periods, driving memory stocks to be some of the market's top performers this year.

Nvidia's revenue explosion in recent years has been mirrored by an expanding profit margin, underscoring the company's pricing power, supply chain efficiency and an increase of software in the mix.

From a gross margin in the mid-60s five years ago, Nvidia has lifted that number into the mid-70s today, and it's one that investors watch closely, particularly with the whole tech industry facing soaring memory costs from a worldwide shortage.

Analysts expect Nvidia to record a gross margin, or the profit left after accounting for the cost of goods sold, of 75% in the latest quarter. That would be in-line with the fiscal fourth quarter and up from an adjusted number of 71.3% a year ago.

Cantor analysts said in a report last week that they're expecting to see gross margin come in at 75.1%, "based on better volumes of rack-scale solutions and continued Blackwell cost improvements."

In the years before the generative AI craze, Nvidia was primarily known for its gaming chips. In fiscal 2020, over half its revenue came from gaming, while just 27% came from the data center.

Fast forward to the present, and Nvidia is almost exclusively a data center company. That part of the business made up 90% of revenue last fiscal year, and there seems to be no stopping it.

Nvidia's Grace Blackwell rack-scale systems have long been sold out, and Wall Street is now watching for the ramping up shipments of its next system, Vera Rubin.

Meanwhile, gaming is now less than 8% of Nvidia's business. And as CNBC reported last month, Nvidia's relentless focus on data center clients has left gamers feeling betrayed, a reality that's become even more apparent of late due to a global memory shortage that's led Nvidia to prioritize Blackwell and Rubin over GeForce gaming GPUs.

One big area of uncertainty is China, specifically pertaining to Nvidia's older Hopper GPU, known as H200. Huang was a last-minute addition to President Donald Trump's China summit last week, but the visit did little to clear up whether H200 sales will be permitted in the country.

Huang said at Nvidia's GTC conference in March that Nvidia had received H200 orders from China.

"We're in the process of restarting our manufacturing," Huang told reporters at the event in San Jose, California. 

Reuters reported last week that a handful of Chinese companies have been approved by the U.S. Commerce Department to purchase H200s, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com.

But one U.S. trade representative said chip export controls were not discussed in the China talks last week, suggesting a major breakthrough on H200 sales may not be close.

China once accounted for at least one-fifth of Nvidia's data center revenue, but the company has been shut out of the country since being told by the Trump administration in April that it would require a license to export chips there and to a handful of other countries.

Cerebras Systems' monster Nasdaq debut last week was a clear signal that tech giants are hungry for alternatives to Nvidia's costly (and sold out) GPUs. The company's market cap swelled to almost $100 billion on its first day of trading.

Cerebras makes a different type of chip, known as a custom ASIC — application-specific integrated circuit — that's been gaining ground as agentic AI shifts compute needs toward inference. While GPUs excel at the parallel math necessary for training large models, inference can happen on less powerful chips programmed for more specific tasks.

It's an increasingly crowded space, with in-house ASICs now made by the likes of Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Cerebras operates its dinner-plate-sized chips inside its own data centers, pitting it against cloud providers Google, Microsoft, Oracle and CoreWeave.

Nvida also makes custom ASICs in-house after spending $20 billion to acquire Groq's technology in December, and then announcing custom Groq Language Processing Units at GTC in March.

Nvidia's stock is up roughly 20% so far this year, underperforming many of its semiconductor peers but still enough of a gain to support the biggest market cap in the world.

Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company in October, and inched closer to reaching the $6 trillion record last week, though after a bit of a pullback the number now sits at $5.5 trillion.

The company's record-breaking run comes as chip companies not named Nvidia hit historic highs. Intel had its best month ever in April, as agentic AI spins up a major renaissance for the central processing unit. Memory makers like Micron, meanwhile, have seen shares surge amid a shortage for the key type of chip needed to support AI.

Alphabet briefly surpassed Nvidia to become the world's most valuable company in after-hours trading earlier this month, but for now that appears to be a momentary blip. Google's parent is currently worth about $4.6 trillion.

Nvidia has been a leading beneficiary of the AI boon due to its graphics processing units, or GPUs, that are used to train and run powerful foundation models.

Data center revenue for Nvidia's fiscal first quarter is expected show an 87% increase from a year earlier to $73.1 billion, representing even faster expansion than the 75% year-over-year jump in the prior quarter and 73% growth rate in the same period a year ago.

The persistent growth reflects the exploding capital expenditures from hyperscalers, which are snapping up GPUs for their data center computing infrastructure that underpins their AI initiatives.

On the same day last month, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all reported quarterly results, giving investors an updated glimpse into their capex forecasts for the year. Financial firms like Evercore and Bank of America are projecting the group will spend over $1 trillion on AI-related capex in 2027, which ultimately benefits Nvidia.

John Belton, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, said in an email on Tuesday that he's "looking for whether the company is broadening its customer base as that remains a major risk," adding that five names account for roughly half of Nvidia's business.

"I'm questioning things such as how durable the growth within that segment of the business is as well as if they're expanding the customer base and broadening the product set," Belton said.