- On Nvidia’s earnings call this week, investors will be focused on what executives say about how the Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek might impact spending in the U.S. tech sector. Heading into the call on Wednesday, investors expect that DeepSeek will have little effect on Nvidia’s sales. However, they will be closely watching for any guidance on the margins for its new Blackwell chip, which is currently launching.
Yet again, Nvidia enters an earnings week with only its past stellar performance to beat. It is, as usual, a victim of its own success and has only to prove to the market that it will continue raising the bar.
For several years now, Nvidia has accustomed investors to a world in which it outperforms their expectations every quarter. Anything less and the stock takes a beating.
Nvidia has to do its “normal exceed” or else it will get “crapped on,” Baird managing director Ted Mortonson told Fortune.
Another strong quarter from Nvidia isn’t in doubt. Nvidia can’t just meet the $37 billion in revenue it forecasted, it has to exceed it. As of now that seems to be on tap, with Wall Street expecting roughly $38 billion.
Investors are expected to parse the call for clues about the future of AI spending and changes to the industry as a result of DeepSeek. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet still expect to allocate a projected $325 billion to capital expenditures this year, most of which will go toward AI research and development. And while DeepSeek certainly roiled the stock market, it appears to have done little to change the estimated AI spending from the sector’s biggest companies.
“We have seen not one AI enterprise deployment slow down or change due to the DeepSeek situation,” wrote Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives.
Among tech bulls, the consensus is that DeepSeek’s success only proves the pace of innovation, and therefore development, is accelerating, and that demand for Nvidia chips will only increase. Governments announced major private-public partnerships for AI investment with the U.S.’s Stargate Project and Europe’s InvestAI initiative, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri wrote in a note to investors last week.
“Even as costs have come down, the spigot of investment dollars flowing into AI infrastructure has only widened further … and we think Nvidia is positioned to remain the primary beneficiary of all this spend,” Arcuri said.
The expectation for Nvidia is that the company will exceed its revenue targets and then further raise its guidance. Last quarter Nvidia had $35.1 billion in revenue, which was a 94% increase from the year before. On that call, CEO Jensen Huang trumpeted the expected demand for its new Blackwell chips, saying production was in “full steam.” Huang then told investors that Nvidia would deliver more Blackwell chips than it had previously expected.
The rollout of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips will be monitored by both the company’s customers and investors. There had been some murmurs of issues with Blackwell when the tech publication The Information reported the chips caused certain server racks to overheat, which required a custom configuration to avoid. (Nvidia said that work was “normal and expected.”)
So far though, customers have seemed undeterred, which has kept investors happy. Instead customers are racing to stockpile as many Blackwell chips as the company will sell them. Investors don’t expect Nvidia’s customers to take a wait-and-see approach to their Blackwell orders based on any concerns about overheating or a new entrant like DeepSeek.
“No customer wants to lose their place in line,” Ives wrote.
That said, Blackwell does elicit some anxiety in investors because it is projected to lower Nvidia’s margins, which the company told Wall Street to expect this quarter. However, if Nvidia’s margins fall further than anticipated, it could be a rare piece of bad news from a company that over-delivers. The fear is that as more and more of Nvidia’s customers build out their own AI systems, they will want Blackwell GPUs but not the GB200 system that helps integrate them into their existing infrastructure. The more that happens, the more Nvidia’s margins risk falling, according to Baird’s Mortonson.
“There’s concern on gross margin and mix—that’s the bottom line,” he said.
Other investors downplayed questions about Blackwell’s margins as a short-term concern that would eventually resolve itself. As long as Big Tech firms keep shelling out billions to buy the new Blackwell chips, Nvidia’s performance won’t suffer, according to Hamilton Capital Partners chief investment officer Alonso Munoz. “This has been such a shining star for the last 24 months that we need something to pick at, and margins are certainly part of that equation.”
However, should Nvidia deliver a lower-than-expected forecast for its following quarter, then the stock would face one of its first real tests with investors. There is also the secondary, but not unimportant, fact that because of the outsize role Nvidia plays in propping up the S&P 500, any loss of faith from investors could spell trouble for the market as a whole.
Chris Larkin, managing director and head of trading and investing at E*Trade from Morgan Stanley, put Nvidia earnings alongside this week’s reports for the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index and GDP growth as shaping sentiment about the broader economy.
