Nvidia ( NVDA ) earnings have become a marquee event on Wall Street. Investors will get their next chance to see the chipmaker's latest numbers when it discloses its fiscal second-quarter results after Wednesday's close.
There's little doubt as to why the market is so hyper-focused on Nvidia earnings. The company's jaw-dropping quarterly results in May 2023 – where the chipmaker forecast quarterly revenue 50% above what Wall Street analysts were calling for at the time – lit a fire under investors' appetites for all things artificial intelligence (AI).
The sizzling growth has continued over the past year or so – and has cemented Nvidia's place as investors' most in-demand AI stock . It has also transformed NVDA into one of Wall Street's most valuable companies.
Indeed, since that fateful earnings event back in May 2023, Nvidia has seen its market value soar to $3.16 trillion from $754.3 billion. In 2024 alone, the stock's market cap has swelled by nearly $2 trillion ($1.94 trillion, to be exact).
NVDA's rapid rise – along with several other mega-cap tech and tech-adjacent stocks dubbed the Magnificent 7 – is largely credited with fueling the broader stock market's surge. It also helped send the S&P 500 from a bear market to a bull market .
But Wall Street veterans already know that NVDA has long been one of the top buy-and-hold investments. Not only has Nvidia been one of the best stocks of the past 30 years , but a $1,000 stake 20 years ago would be worth roughly $840,000 today.
More recently, NVDA pulled back sharply during this summer's broad-market selloff. Several catalysts sparked the drop, including a collapse of the carry trade in Japan . Profit-taking also contributed to the selloff.
However, Nvidia quickly rebounded and is trading back near its early June peak.
Is Nvidia expected to beat earnings?
Nvidia has a long history of beating analysts' earnings and revenue expectations. In its most recently reported quarter, the company disclosed earnings of $6.12 per share on revenue of $26.0 billion vs Wall Street's forecast for earnings of $5.59 per share on $24.6 billion in sales.
This time around, analysts, on average, expect Nvidia to report earnings of 64 cents per share. Note that this is considerably lower than its Q1 results due to the 10-for-1 stock split the company enacted in June. This compares to its year-ago, post-split earnings of 25 cents per share.
Revenue is expected to land at $28.6 billion, more than double the $13.5 billion it reported in the year-ago period.
Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer (Outperform, the equivalent of a Buy) sees upside to the company's second-quarter results and third-quarter outlook amid sustained AI demand.
"Lead times have normalized though supply remains tight," Schafer writes in a note, adding that Nvidia remains the purest-scale play on AI proliferation and that its entrenched data center AI ecosystem is critical to the adoption of generative AI.
Is Nvidia stock still worth buying?
Despite the fact that Nvidia is up 160% for the year to date and trades at a lofty 46 times forward earnings, Wall Street is firmly in the chipmaker's bull camp.
Track all markets on TradingView Of the 60 analysts covering the stock tracked by S&P Global Market Intelligence , 44 say it's a Strong Buy, 12 have it at Buy and four call it a Hold. This works out to a consensus Strong Buy recommendation, making NVDA one of analysts' top-rated S&P 500 stocks .
Speaking for the bulls is Stifel analyst Ruben Roy . "We believe that NVDA is well-positioned in markets that combine to yield an overall total addressable market of more than $100 billion exiting 2025 and a longer-term opportunity funnel that could approach $1 trillion," Roy says.
While the analyst is upbeat about Nvidia's exposure to the gaming and automotive industries, he notes that "the shift from general purpose compute to accelerated compute represents the company’s most significant revenue and profitability growth opportunity over the next several years."
Over at BofA Securities, analyst Vivek Arya says Nvidia is a top sector pick. "We see any selloff as [an] enhanced buying opportunity as challenges are not in demand, but in (solvable) supply that will not fundamentally derail NVDA's longer-term momentum," Arya writes in a note to clients.
The analyst is referring to concerns surrounding a potential hold-up of the company's new Blackwell AI chips, but he notes that "there was no mention of delays in earnings calls of major cloud customers (who raise capex) or of major supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ( TSM )."
Ultimately, whether or not you choose to buy Nvidia stock before or after earnings should be based on your personal investing goals. However, Wall Street is fully behind NVDA and is upbeat about its long-term growth potential.
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