Nvidia Reports Earnings Tonight With $79 Billion in Revenue on the Line
Finance & Business | Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Nvidia will release its fiscal first-quarter results after the closing bell today, with analysts expecting revenue of $79.2 billion, a 79.5% increase from the same quarter last year and a figure that would rank among the largest quarterly revenue totals ever posted by a public company. Earnings per share are forecast at $1.78, up 120% year over year.
The report, scheduled to cross the wire at approximately 4:20 pm Eastern Time followed by a conference call at 5 pm, arrives at a tense moment for markets. Treasury yields have climbed to multi-year highs: the 30-year reached 5.197% on Tuesday and the 10-year hit 4.687%. The S&P 500 closed Tuesday down 0.7% at 7,353. Nvidia’s stock slipped 0.8% on the day, though it remains up roughly 20% year to date with a market capitalization of approximately $5.4 trillion.
What Analysts Are Watching
The headline numbers for the quarter are largely settled. Nvidia guided for Q1 revenue of $78 billion, plus or minus 2%, with Data Center expected to contribute roughly $72.8 billion of that total. Non-GAAP gross margins are projected at approximately 75%.
For Morgan Stanley analyst Joe Moore, who moved Nvidia to a top pick in March, the results themselves matter less than the commentary that follows. Moore said he would be watching for details on supply constraints affecting powered shell availability, leading-edge wafer capacity, and DRAM. He said Nvidia “should have the supply to cover much of what they intend to ship over the next 18 months,” though rising costs tied to the company’s next-generation Rubin architecture could create margin headwinds further out.
John Belton, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, expects the results to be “amazingly boring as usual,” meaning another beat. He said Nvidia is “now seeing a trillion-dollar order book, at least through 2027,” and will be watching for progress on the company’s networking business and standalone CPU racks. Belton added that with Nvidia expected to generate “well over a trillion dollars in free cash flow over the next couple of years,” capital allocation will attract scrutiny: “If half of that comes back to shareholders, that can start to meaningfully move the needle for the stock.”
Zacks Investment Management’s Brian Mulberry offered a more cautious set of estimates: EPS of $1.51 on $67.38 billion in revenue, below the Wall Street consensus. His “whisper number,” the threshold the stock needs to move on, sits at $1.60 per share. Data center revenue, which grew 75% last quarter, is likely to come in at a similar growth rate, Mulberry said, with demand for Blackwell chips “only picking up.”
Richard Reyle, Chief Investment Officer at Questar Capital Partners, called Wednesday’s earnings event “the ultimate test for a stock market that is not only trading at record highs, but one that also had a breathtaking bounce off of the March lows.” Reyle said Nvidia serves as the market’s “shorthand for everything AI” and warned that strong results do not guarantee upside: “To say that Nvidia is priced for perfection is an understatement.”
The China Variable
China will almost certainly come up during the conference call. Jensen Huang traveled to the country last week alongside President Trump and a group of technology executives. He spoke publicly about the market opportunity afterward. “The Chinese government has to decide how much of their local market do they want to protect,” Huang told Bloomberg TV on Monday. “My sense is that, over time, the market will open.”
The U.S. government approved sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to Chinese companies in December, but Beijing has continued to block purchases in an effort to support domestic chipmaker Huawei Technologies. Huang has previously characterized China as a $50 billion opportunity. A shift in Beijing’s stance would add materially to Nvidia’s addressable market.
The H20 situation has already cost the company significantly. Nvidia took a $4.5 billion charge in fiscal Q1 2026 tied to H20 inventory and purchase obligations after the U.S. government imposed export licensing requirements for H20 products into China. For Q2 of the current fiscal year, the company projected an estimated $8 billion H20 revenue loss baked into its guidance.
Competition and New Challengers
The week has produced two notable data points on the competitive front.
Cerebras Systems went public last week at $185 per share and ended its first trading day at $331, a 68% gain, giving the company a market capitalization of $95 billion. Cerebras raised $5.55 billion in the offering, making it one of the largest IPOs in recent years. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine 3 chip is 50 to 60 times the surface area of an Nvidia GPU die, with 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 AI cores. Cerebras claims it is faster than Nvidia’s equivalents for certain workloads. Analysts note the company remains focused on niche deployments and operates at far smaller scale, with quarterly revenue of approximately $171 million despite 96% growth.
Separately, AI infrastructure startup Decart announced a $300 million funding round this week at a $4 billion valuation, led by Radical Ventures with participation from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark. Decart’s product, called DOS (the Decart Optimization Stack), is designed to make it easier to move AI workloads between hardware vendors, including Nvidia, Amazon, and Google. The company says its platform is 100 times more cost-efficient and eight times faster than current alternatives. Nvidia is among Decart’s early investors, an arrangement that keeps the chipmaker close to any hardware-flexibility movement in the industry even as DOS could theoretically reduce lock-in to Nvidia’s products.
One Bear, 58 Bulls
Of the 61 Wall Street analysts who cover Nvidia, 58 rate the stock a Buy, two rate it a Hold, and one rates it a Sell. Jay Goldberg of Seaport Research Partners holds that lone Sell rating, with a 12-month target of $100. Goldberg has compared current semiconductor market dynamics to the late 1990s. “Every time you start to hear people saying, ‘This time is different. This is a new economy,'” he told Marketplace last week, “I think it’s right to sort of be cautious.” The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 50% in six weeks earlier this year before pulling back.
Hedge funds were net sellers of Nvidia stock in the first quarter of 2026, reducing exposure by a net 126.6 million shares. The stock underperformed the broader market in Q1, falling 6.5% versus the S&P 500’s 4.3% decline. It has recovered sharply since then.
By one calculation, Nvidia’s market cap now represents approximately 16% of U.S. GDP. Its year-to-date gain in market cap terms is roughly comparable to Walmart’s entire valuation. The NextEra Energy acquisition of Dominion Energy, announced Monday at $66.8 billion in an all-stock deal, was itself motivated by surging data center electricity demand. That announcement is a downstream consequence of the same AI infrastructure buildout that Nvidia is supplying.
What Huang says about demand trajectories at 5 pm tonight will shape the conversation about whether that buildout is still accelerating, or approaching something more complicated than a straight line up.
Sources: Nvidia Earnings: Live Updates May 2026 — Kiplinger | NVDA Q1 2027 Earnings Report — MarketBeat | Nvidia Q1 FY2027 Earnings Preview — S&P Global | Nvidia Earnings Preview Q1 FY27 — BitMEX | What History Tells Us About Nvidia Post-Earnings — Motley Fool | NVIDIA tops $40bn in AI equity bets in 2026 — The Next Web
