Live Updates: Will NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) Stock Soar After Earnings Tonight?

For after-hours coverage, make sure to check out our new live blog. We’ll be reporting on every major storyline driving NVIDIA’s share price after it announces earnings in less than an hour. You can access it by clicking here.

Something that might surprise you is how dramatically expectations for NVIDIA’s quarterly profits have dropped headed into their report tonight.

• 12 months ago: Wall Street analysts expected .80 in adjusted EPS this quarter
• 6 months ago: They expected .92 in adjusted EPS
• 2 months ago: They expected .93 in adjusted EPS
• Today: They expect $.75 in adjusted EPS

The downward revision is largely due to impacts from China. Expectations for next quarter have softened as well, going down from 1.05 in normalized EPS three months ago to $.99 today.

However, expectations for the back half of the year haven’t fallen as much. Tonight, NVIDIA will deliver commentary on how their redesigned (and export-compliant) chips could compare to the sale of H20 chips which rely on technologies like high-bandwidth memory that has been more heavily restricted recently.

When NVIDIA last reported earnings in February, its stock dropped 8.5% the next day. Will tomorrow be a repeat?

A good place to examine what Wall Street was concerned about (and led to the sell-off) is an analysis of what questions Wall Street asked about on NVIDIA’s earnings call.

1. Concerns about Margins

Main Questions From:

• Vivek Arya (BofA Securities)

• Atif Malik (Citi)

Why it’s a focus:
Analysts repeatedly questioned whether Q1 is the gross margin bottom and how NVIDIA can recover to the mid-70% range. Key drivers of concern include:

• Costs from ramping Blackwell systems (especially liquid-cooled and NVLink 72 variants).

• Complexity in system configurations.

• External risks like tariffs and export controls.

Implication for Today’s Earnings:
Expect scrutiny on margin guidance, cost reduction roadmaps, and any early signals of margin expansion or erosion.

2. Inference & Reasoning AI Demand Evolution

Main Questions From:

• C.J. Muse (Cantor Fitzgerald)

• Mark Lipacis (Evercore ISI)

• Tim Arcuri (UBS)

Why it’s a focus:
Analysts emphasized the growing compute demands from post-training and inference workloads, including:

• New scaling laws tied to “reasoning AI.”

• Use of Blackwell specifically for inference at massive scale.

• Demand for flexible infrastructure that can shift between pretraining, post-training, and inference.

Implication for Today’s Earnings:
Analysts will want updates on whether inference is becoming a larger revenue driver, how customers are architecting clusters, and whether Blackwell’s advantage in inference translates to stickier adoption. Remember, earlier we posted an except from a Morgan Stanley research note saying that hyperscalers have been surprised by the demand for inference across the board, so our expectation at 24/7 Wall St. is that NVIDIA will be very bullish about demand for inferencing in tonight’s call.

3. Supply Chain & System Ramp Execution

Main Questions From:

• Joe Moore (Morgan Stanley)

• Harlan Sur (J.P. Morgan)

Why it’s a focus:
With complex systems involving 1.5M components and 350+ factories, analysts are probing:

• Whether NVIDIA can simultaneously ramp Blackwell and launch Blackwell Ultra on schedule.

• If supply chain execution risk could limit deliveries.

• Whether transition from Hopper to Blackwell introduces integration frictions.

Implication for Today’s Earnings:
Wall Street will look for signs that NVIDIA can sustain manufacturing at scale, smoothly transition between generations, and avoid production-related surprises.

Earlier in this preview we provided more analysis on reports that NVIDIA’s partners seem to have solved liquid cooling issues that have delayed the rollout of server racks at scale. This could lead to a larger Blackwell revenue ramp in the back half of the year.

While NVIDIA’s stock dropped after it last announced earnings on February 26th, our proprietary 24/7 Sentiment Analysis evaluation scored NVIDIA’s last earnings call as bullish. 

What’s NVIDIA so bullish on? Here are five quotes that show the areas the company is most excited about heading into next year:

• “Blackwell sales exceeded our expectations. We delivered $11 billion of Blackwell revenue… This is the fastest product ramp in our company’s history, unprecedented in its speed and scale.”
  — Colette Kress
• “Our performance and pace of innovation is unmatched. We’ve driven a 200x reduction in inference costs in just the last 2 years.”
  — Colette Kress
• “We’re really just in the beginning of this new era. All software and all services will be based on machine learning… This is now a software tool that can address a much larger part of the world’s GDP more than any time in history.”
  — Jensen Huang
• “The software stack is incredibly hard. The ecosystem that sits on top of our architecture is 10x more complex than it was 2 years ago… That’s why we win.”
  — Jensen Huang
• “We have a fairly good line of sight of the amount of capital investment that data centers are building out towards… All signals—near-term, mid-term, long-term—indicate this transformation is accelerating.”
  — Jensen Huang

How much could NVIDIA move tomorrow?  Options traders are pricing in a 7.4% move tomorrow, which is less than its movement the day following its last earnings report in February. Generally, reactions to NVIDIA’s earnings have gotten more muted following recent reports as its ‘earnings beats’ have become more consistent, typically in the low-single-digit percentages.

One reason to be excited about NVIDIA ahead of tonight’s earnings?

Evidence continues to build that recent breakthroughs in AI – such as reasoning models – are fueling strong growth in AI usage. As Morgan Stanley recently reported:

“Every hyerperscaler [Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft] has reported unanticipated strong toekn growth. But our conviction is not driven by that, it’s driven by the fact that literally everyone we talk to in the space is telling us they have been surprised by inference demand, and there is a scramble to add GPUs.”

Between systems builders finally solving how to produce Blackwell systems at scale (covered below) and rebaid demand for running AI models (inferencing), all signs point to rabid demand for NVIDIA’s chips in the second half of 2025.

NVIDIA is up about 25% in the past month, but it might surprise you how much the stock is outperforming other AI rivals in the semiconductor space recently:

While many smaller and more ‘speculative’ stocks have rallied across the past month, NVIDIA has outperformed most its rival despite being a $3 trillion company.

The opening bell has rung and the stock market is open for the day. NVIDIA’s pre-market gains have faded, and the stock is almost exactly flat at 9:35 a.m. ET. It looks like there won’t be any major fireworks during the trading day before the company reports earnings tonight.

NVIDIA has surpassed Wall Street targets for 9 straight quarters, so its a good bet that they’ll extend that streak tonight.

Of course, simply beating earnings expectations no longer means NVIDIA will rise the next day. Last quarter, the company beat by $.04 per share ($.85 expected vs. $.89 reported), but dropped more than 8% the next day.

After NVIDIA reports earnings, Wall Street will react to whether or not the stock outperformed last quarter. However, the ‘big picture’ is how long the company can keep growing at high levels in the years to come. Here are the current expectations for NVIDIA’s fiscal 2026 earnings.

If the company announces guidance for next quarter or gives bullish commentary and these estimates go up, the company’s stock should outperform in the weeks to come.

Current fiscal 2026 (ending in January 2026) estimates: 

• Revenue: $199.3 billion (53% growth)
• EPS: $4.16 normalized (39% growth)
• Free Cash Flow: $94 billion (55% growth)
• Gross Margin: 71.85% (75.5% last year)

NVIDIA is up about .76% as of 8:45 a.m. ET.

Nasdaq futures are up .23% premarket, while S&P futures are up .09%. It looks to be a relatively muted day (barring a curveball like new tariff announcements) following yesterday’s big gains. NVIDIA finished yesterday up 3.21% and is now up about 25% in the prior month.