Nvidia will report its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday after the market closes. The report is highly anticipated by analysts and investors who are eager to see how much revenue the company generated from its powerful Blackwell line of chips. They also want insights into how the AI giant is navigating potential threats on shipments of its processors to China.
Nvidia is the leader in AI chips and its competitors are still far behind in terms of performance. Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars in building out their AI data centers, with a significant portion of that money going to Nvidia. However, the company faces challenges such as clients becoming rivals and more efficient AI models like those developed by DeepSeek, which could push customers to purchase less expensive chips over time.
Wall Street expects Nvidia to report earnings per share of $0.84 on revenue of $38.2 billion for the quarter. This would represent a 63% increase in EPS and a 73% jump in revenue compared to the same period last year. The data center business is expected to generate the majority of the revenue at $34 billion, while gaming is set to bring in $3 billion.
Q4 earnings expectations for Nvidia
Shares of Nvidia are down over 5% year to date, along with other Big Tech companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. Meta is the only outlier, with shares up over 10%.
This will be Nvidia’s first quarterly report since China’s DeepSeek sent shares of AI companies plummeting in late January. At the time, investors worried that DeepSeek’s claims of developing a powerful model using below top-of-the-line Nvidia chips would hurt demand for the company’s more powerful processors. However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argued that running models like DeepSeek’s on high-powered chips provides better results and incentivizes companies to invest more in top-of-the-line processors.
Nvidia also faces the threat of tariffs on chips imported from Taiwan, where many of its processors are produced by TSMC. Further export restrictions on Nvidia chips destined for China could cut into the company’s revenue from that region. In Q3, Nvidia got the bulk of its revenue from the US at $14.8 billion, followed by Singapore at $7.6 billion and China at $5.4 billion.
Some on Wall Street have raised concerns about the impact of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta using their own custom AI chips instead of Nvidia’s. However, Morgan Stanley Research analyst Joseph Moore advises caution against overreacting to this potential competition, noting that Nvidia has the most mature ecosystem and alternatives often fail to gain traction.
