MW As Nvidia earnings draw closer, here are 5 things investors need to watch
By Britney Nguyen
The chip maker's stock has been a laggard - but Goldman Sachs sees five potential catalysts that could come out of its earnings call later this month
Nvidia, led by CEO Jensen Huang, reports its fiscal first-quarter results on May 20.
Nvidia is still at the center of the artificial-intelligence universe, but its stock doesn't necessarily reflect that. Yet a Goldman Sachs analyst sees potential for renewed excitement once the company reports earnings later this month.
Shares of Nvidia (NVDA) have fallen behind peers in the semiconductor rally. Nvidia's stock was up 2.7% on Friday morning, and is up about 15% so far this year. By comparison, the broader PHLX Semiconductor Index SOX has risen 61% on the year.
When Nvidia reports earnings on May 20, Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider expects another impressive beat, even though "the bar for stock outperformance is relatively high." Nvidia's stock is trading "at a meaningful discount relative to history," he wrote in a Thursday note.
See more: Here's just how much Nvidia has been left behind in the extreme semiconductor rally
So how can Nvidia re-engage investors?
For one, management could update its guidance for $1 trillion in revenue from its Blackwell and Rubin AI platforms through 2027. Schneider said investors will likely be listening for whether there's upside to that number, which Nvidia already raised earlier this year. Further optimism could come from products not initially included in that projection, such as its Vera central-processing-unit-only racks and its inference chips.
The Vera racks are expected to ship in the second half of this year, coinciding with a resurgence in demand for CPUs that's been driven by agentic AI and the shift to inference. That could lead Nvidia to raise its guidance for its data-center CPU business, which will be a high point for investors on the call, Schneider said.
Meanwhile, the collective capital expenditures of Nvidia's hyperscaler customers is crawling toward $700 billion, and that's a good sign that spending will continue to grow, Schneider noted. Concerns over the sustainability of hyperscaler spending on AI has weighed on Nvidia's stock in recent months.
But customer growth and spending trends for Nvidia's nonhyperscaler customers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are just as important to showing the health of the AI trade, Schneider added, and he's expecting management to offer a view on that.
Read on: Big Tech's $700 billion spending on AI this year is called the 'greatest capital misallocation in history'
Another point of contention for investors has been rising competition from custom-chip programs such as Google's $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ tensor processing units, which power its Gemini AI models and other AI applications. Meta Platforms (META), Amazon.com (AMZN) and Microsoft $(MSFT)$ also have their own silicon used in tandem with Nvidia's chips.
"We expect Nvidia to highlight its view that it remains the leader in driving the lowest inference costs with its annual product cadence," Schneider said - noting that Blackwell has demonstrated a 10-times cost improvement from the preceding chip generation.
But even if strong demand remains intact for Nvidia's chips, the company and its chip-making peers are facing shortages across the supply chain, from memory chips to advanced chip-packaging materials. As prices rise for these components, Schneider said it will be important for Nvidia to ensure investors that it can keep its gross margin in the mid-70% range in 2026, especially as Rubin ramps later this year.
-Britney Nguyen
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May 08, 2026 13:02 ET (17:02 GMT)
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