Nvidia reports first-quarter earnings after the bell

Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter earnings on Wednesday after the bell.

Here’s what Wall Street is expecting, per LSEG:

• Earnings per share: 93 cents adjusted
• Revenue: $43.31 billion

Wall Street is expecting the artificial intelligence chip giant to guide for 99 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $45.9 billion of sales in the July quarter.

Nvidia continues to see massive growth from its sales of graphics processors, with demand for the company’s AI chips showing no signs of cooling.

But there is one big thought on many investors’ minds during this earnings call: China.

On April 9, the Trump administration sent Nvidia a letter that said it would require an export license for the company’s H20 chip, a version of its Hopper AI chips specially designed for the Chinese market to comply with previous U.S. restrictions.

Nvidia said it would take a $5.5 billion write-down on inventory. Nvidia analysts will be closely looking to see what effect the restrictions have on the company’s revenue.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also took to the road in recent weeks to sell the company’s AI infrastructure to foreign countries, including Saudi Arabia. He will likely want to address the topic on Wednesday, too, and give some insight into how the company sees the current export control regime.

Aside from Nvidia’s geopolitical issues, the big story will be if Blackwell, the company’s current generation of AI GPUs, has enough supply and continues to see endless demand.

But ultimately, what investors will want to see is the company confidently saying that demand for its Blackwell products — such as the GB200 racks that are currently shipping — remains strong.

“The key here is the optimism around GB200 improving, and strong demand, and if the company can make the case for that, the stock should react well, in our view even if numbers don’t change much,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore in a note Tuesday.

Wall Street is expecting 66% growth in the April quarter. But that is still a sharp deceleration from a year ago, when the company’s revenue more than tripled.

Powering Nvidia’s massive growth is sales to a handful of giant cloud providers, often called hyperscalers. These cloud companies are buying as many of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips as they can to power and install into data centers.

Earlier this month, hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Meta said they planned to continue aggressively spending on AI.